Ascendancy was a game released in 1995 by ‘The Logic Factory’ for MS-DOS. It was a long time favorite of mine that never saw a proper macOS release, and so in 2026 I decided to try my hand at using new reverse engineering tools, and AI tooling to re-create the original logic of game while porting the UI and gameplay aspects to modern macOS design conventions. This was the first step towards working on a sequel that the original developers never delivered.
The PROCESS
The original MS-DOS game had no public source, and no online resources so every aspect had to be decoded from the original binaries. Taking the source code for DOSBox and using AI tooling I was build in a cycle recording tool to record every processor instruction that the game executed into a dense and compressed data stream that took full advance of Apple’s compression blocks in their M-class processor. This allowed me to record minutes of gameplay and then search the resultant data stream recording with a Swift CLI tool. In addition to cycle recording I added memory dumping functionality and a Swift UI frontend to the recording tools so that DOSBox could run uninterrupted from my tooling.
In addition I used Ghidra to decompile the original binary into machine code. Armed with this map, the recordings, and memory dumps, I was able to guide AI tools to reconstruct the game’s models and logic in Swift.
With multiple saved game files from the original game I was able to deconstruct the game loading and saving logic, making it easy to look for discrepancies between my port and the original game. My port can take files from the original game and play them faithfully.
NEW FEatures
The goal for this port was not to add features that changed the core gameplay. Only to add some basic features that made gameplay more satisfying.
- Search and Sort in the Planet and Ship views
- Modern 3D rendering of the galactic map, system view, and tech tree
- Better range displays during combat
