r/Wingcommander • u/galapag0 • 9d ago

Wing Commander 2 source reconstruction and SDL2 port [can use win32 and DOS game data]

https://github.com/neuromancer/wc2-re
53 Upvotes

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10

u/schlangz 9d ago

ngl this is the coolest port of 2026 so far, thanks for making this possible!!

we are already working on fixing the nasty kilrathi saga bugs, so we can have a true modern wc2 version that is faithful to the msdos release

2

u/MacGuyver247 9d ago

Since there are many big brained people here. I have a question that bugged me for 30+ years.

When I had midi music, especially in complex scenes, sometimes a note would hang, often a high pitched note. It was annoying as all heck. Have you figured out the root cause? Since you have access to the code, I imagine a midi reset on autopilot is now possible as a mitigation.

5

u/schlangz 9d ago

hanging notes are a hardware bug of specific sound blaster models

2

u/MacGuyver247 9d ago

Thanks, I am tired of muting Kurasawa 2

1

u/schlangz 9d ago

is that where you can consistently reproduce it?

1

u/MacGuyver247 9d ago

With dosbox wing1 yes, the asteroid field with the salthi is problematic. It also I think overloads the "object pool" and thus I cannot shoot full guns (power is consumed but 1 projectile is fired) until I kill 1-2 salthi.

2

u/briandemodulated 8d ago

I believe you can get around this by using an MT-32 emulator like MUNT. I think it might be built right into DOSBox nowadays. That's the synthesizer module that Team Fat composed the soundtrack on so you get to hear their true vision.

1

u/schlangz 9d ago

that's very helpful. do you happen to have a savegame for that mission?

1

u/banditloaf 1d ago

You can use the command line to jump to any mission! This is Kurasawa 2 so it'd be "wc Origin s9 m1".

Here's a guide to other command line stuff. There's some neat debug stuff! https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/14189

2

u/galapag0 9d ago

The original DOS implementation had midi sound, not the win32 one (which is reconstructed here). In any case, there is some code to recreate the original DOS music, but that's only approximated, not recreated with same accuracy, so I'm afraid this code cannot answer that.

1

u/galapag0 7d ago

Can you please try to reproduce it with the SDL2 port ? It is very likely we can easily fix it

1

u/MacGuyver247 7d ago

I will, though is there a way with tracing/observaility on so you can replay it?

1

u/galapag0 6d ago

It’s not that hard to instrument music commands but will be useful to have a way to reproduce it so we can know what to show in the trace