A team of volunteers has spent five years reverse-engineering the 1997 video game Lego Island to enable it to run on modern computers, and to allow programmers to fix bugs and makes suggested improvements.
It was the first Lego-themed video game released outside of Japan, and became a hit, selling more than a million copies, and is loved by fans, setting the path for further titles.
The group, led by indie developer MattKC, used custom-made tools to recreate the game’s codebase, but found “compiler entropy” had introduced unexpected behaviours in the code.
They had to decide how to handle modern Direct X as the original game relied on obsolete retained mode, rather than the more commonly used immediate mode.
