I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
Details
- External ID
- 46954696
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
- Website domain
- wallstreetraider.com
- Launched
- Feb. 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 721
- Upvotes percentile
- 1.0
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie hacker passion projects
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- stock market simulator from 1986
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 100 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 101 (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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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.