Case study

TA: Byte Tactics — byte-matching Total Annihilation source reconstruction

TA: Byte Tactics is a matching decompilation of Total Annihilation (Cavedog, 1997). The C++ in src/ is written to compile with Visual C++ 5.0 into the same bytes as TotalA.exe. The README says all 3,267 game functions match.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-07
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 53
Last commit: 2026-11-10
Language: C++

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

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Evidence

Observed: Code and documentation observed; no download method or demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-09

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

The matching target is TotalA.exe, MD5 8e74a1dffa1f5988624c52048f5b20cd. The player supplies Total Annihilation. The setup script fetches the compiler.
Tooling in tools/ is MIT. The README says the reconstructed code in src/ is not offered under a license.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{byte-tactics,
  title = {{TA: Byte Tactics — byte-matching Total Annihilation source reconstruction}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/HectorBailey/byte-tactics}},
  url = {https://github.com/HectorBailey/byte-tactics},
  urldate = {2026-11-07},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/byte-tactics/}}
}

Plain text

TA: Byte Tactics — byte-matching Total Annihilation source reconstruction. https://github.com/HectorBailey/byte-tactics (accessed 2026-11-07). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/byte-tactics/

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · HectorBailey/byte-tactics · Revision 3ef535b