When we were kids, my brother Patrick and I would steer our space fighter with one of us on controls and the other on the lasers and afterburner boost. We always dreamed of playing the Wing Commander series cooperatively as wingmates rather than as a two headed hydra in a single craft.
On October 4, 2015 as I was playing the classic Wing Commander in Dosbox I realized the whole memory probably fit in that 640K Bill Gates apocryphally said “ought to be enough for anybody”. If I could dump the memory and identify the locations that held the X,Y,Z coords for the player & wingman we could let the network packets control the wingman.
This presented a clear problem to attack: out of fewer than a million bytes how would we identify that location? I decided to simplify the problem by trying to empty the game of other entities. A stopped player shouldn’t change coordinates. We could snapshot the memory twice when stopped to identify “background” memory churn. Then burst forward and measure again. If we didn’t turn (mouse was disabled) we might only change one axis. The next problem was to find an empty region of space. We had to start without our wingman Paladin, since he would move with us. After a miserable mission, letting the nefarious space cats overwhelm Paladin and running back to the spacecraft carrier, the Claw, the next mission was primed for a flight through empty space. I launched and flew directly ahead until everything despawned and took the memory snapshots using the DOSBox MEMDUMPBIN debug-command.
