I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
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Hello my name is Ben Ward for the past 3 years I have been remastering the financial game Wall Street Raider created by Michael Jenkins originally on DOS in 1986.It has been a rough journey but I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just recently redid the website and thought maybe the full story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.
HN · launched Feb 10, 2026 · 721 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views
Niche: management and simulation games · 82 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -58% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 82 launches in management and simulation games →
Could you build this?
No Reverse-engineering and accurately porting tens of thousands of lines of esoteric, decades-old legacy DOS financial simulation logic is a monumental reverse-engineering and domain-specific financial modeling challenge.
What it would actually take: Requires deep reverse engineering of legacy 16-bit DOS binaries or legacy BASIC/Pascal/C codebases, decompilation, and meticulous extraction of complex corporate finance, tax, and macro-economic algorithms. Rebuilding it demands porting these intricate state machines into a modern language (C#/C++ or Rust) and building modern financial dashboard UIs while preserving 40 years of interdependent simulation mechanics.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Capitalism Lab, Microprose, Kitfox, Hooded Horse, Speculator
Concerns raised: Performance took longer than promised 10 minutes, Concerns about AI-generated content lacking authenticity and authentic voice, Codebase size (115 kloc) seems insufficient for simulating complex financial features like mergers and derivatives, Difficulty of simulating real trading without implementing actual brokerage systems
Feature requests: Access to original binary/playable version, UI enhancements and quality of life improvements, Moddability support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 159 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 160 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 102 days after the earliest competitor.
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