Recompiling the Lost Vikings

Cool! Back in 2001 I had the domain TheLostVikings.com<p>Wow, it&#x27;s still on the ISP hosting. I haven&#x27;t seen this in years: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;homepage.eircom.net&#x2F;~lostvikings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;homepage.eircom.net&#x2F;~lostvikings&#x2F;</a> The download links are broken but lots of animated gifs are still there.

FYI, Blizzard has a modern-PC-friendly free download up, along with Blackthorne, Rock&#x27;n&#x27;Roll Racing, and Diablo II (!): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.battle.net&#x2F;account&#x2F;download&#x2F;?show=classic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;us.battle.net&#x2F;account&#x2F;download&#x2F;?show=classic</a>

Really neat project! The tools are released under CC-0 on Github.<p>The HN thread [1] on Part 1 went into discussion about how platform differences and the prospect of more rapid iteration meant that several early games were written with VMs. It&#x27;s amusing that when we resurrect these games today, we are often running a VM that emulates an old architecture that then runs the original game&#x27;s VM in turn.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13694524" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13694524</a>

The Lost Vikings was a favorite of mine growing up. I remember jumping amd yelling at the screen while playing it with my sister.<p>I have always had a passion to hack and mod anything and everything. I think I&#x27;m going to make some time this weekend to see what I can do with The Lost Vikings.<p>Thanks for sharing.

Looks like Game Maker (a tool for creating video games using scripting). Very interesting stuff. Anyone knows if other ports of TLV, e.g. SNES, use the same virtual machine?

The way each object is implemented in the VM reminds me a lot of the way you wrote objects in ZZT (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZZT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZZT</a>).

&gt; The Lost Vikings Virtual Machine however does not have a stack. It has a single temporary register, object fields and globals.<p>The technical term for this architecture is an &quot;accumulator machine&quot;?

Thanks for good blog post, this just goes better and better.<p>I wonder what Blizzard thinks&#x2F;would think of this effort ?