Case study

HERCULAN Engine: reimplementing Earthsiege 2 from retail binaries

HERCULAN Engine reimplements Earthsiege 2 in .NET from analysis of its retail executables and data formats. It reads original CD or ISO files, recreates gameplay and rendering on Windows and Linux, and includes HercWorks tools plus documentation of the game's archives, simulation, and shell behavior.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06
Evidence class: C1 partial scope or analysis entry

Stars: 20
Last commit: 2026-11-09
Language: C#

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

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Evidence

Demo screenshot from the project's public documentation

Observed: Code, documentation, download and demo observed; a full-reconstruction candidate for manual Class 0 review.
Scope: Partial
Checked: 2026-11-09

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: A copy of the original Earthsiege 2 game files.
Prerequisites: An x86-64 PC with OpenGL 3.3; Windows 10+ or Linux with glibc 2.34+.
Prerequisites: The .NET 8 SDK is needed to build from source.
License: MIT applies to the code; branding artwork has separate terms.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{herculan-earthsiege-2-case,
  title = {{HERCULAN Engine: reimplementing Earthsiege 2 from retail binaries}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/kevinfoley/Herculan}},
  url = {https://github.com/kevinfoley/Herculan},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/herculan-earthsiege-2-case/}}
}

Plain text

HERCULAN Engine: reimplementing Earthsiege 2 from retail binaries. https://github.com/kevinfoley/Herculan (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/herculan-earthsiege-2-case/

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About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources.

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Primary sources

README.MD GitHub · kevinfoley/Herculan · Revision 6be5bb0
tools/ghidra_scripts/README.md GitHub · kevinfoley/Herculan · Revision 6be5bb0
LICENSE.txt GitHub · kevinfoley/Herculan · Revision 6be5bb0