AwesomeREA.org

Case study

Snowball War: a bounded REA-assisted minigame reconstruction

The author uses REA’s Ghidra workflow to investigate the DOS Ski or Die binary, document Snowball War rules and rebuild that one minigame in Rust with SDL2. The public notes distinguish recovered tables and mechanics from approximations and deliberate presentation changes.

Requirements and limitations

  • Requires the user’s matching DOS/EGA game files and Python 3 for asset extraction. The Linux build uses Rust stable (author-tested with 1.93), Cargo and SDL2 development libraries; Cargo.toml specifies the SDL2 binding 0.37.
  • The reported analysis used Ghidra 12.1.4 and JDK 21 through the REA CLI after unpacking EXEPACK. Caller-supplied function/code seeds are assertions, not independent discoveries by Ghidra.
  • Only Snowball War is reconstructed. Other events and the original engine are excluded; menus are new, and the close-up animation is deliberately restricted to the fort zone rather than reproducing every original placement.
  • The frame rate is approximated at 35 Hz, the original PRNG was not recovered, pause/exit keys are approximations, and audio playback is missing. Gameplay tests and static evidence do not replace the explicitly absent side-by-side comparison with the running DOS original.
  • The pinned LICENSE.md and Cargo.toml offer MIT OR Apache-2.0, while the README’s license sentence mentions MIT only. Original art/audio must be extracted separately; no game or test was run for this catalog.

About this entry

Type
Case study
Category
Community REA investigations
Relationship
Author-reported mixed workflow
Targets
Game

Sources reviewed

The description was reviewed against primary sources. This does not establish runtime testing, security auditing or verified compatibility.

Primary sources

  1. https://github.com/tuunanet/rea-ski-or-die-reconstruction/blob/0eac0671c90e21a16e663da7772b60710101ef7f/README.md
  2. https://github.com/tuunanet/rea-ski-or-die-reconstruction/blob/0eac0671c90e21a16e663da7772b60710101ef7f/Cargo.toml
  3. https://github.com/tuunanet/rea-ski-or-die-reconstruction/blob/0eac0671c90e21a16e663da7772b60710101ef7f/LICENSE.md
  4. https://github.com/tuunanet/rea-ski-or-die-reconstruction/blob/0eac0671c90e21a16e663da7772b60710101ef7f/docs/reverse-engineering-notes.md
  5. https://github.com/tuunanet/rea-ski-or-die-reconstruction/blob/0eac0671c90e21a16e663da7772b60710101ef7f/tests/gameplay.rs