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In any MMORPG, the average user will generally only encounter the client side of the system. This makes building a compatible open source version of the proprietary server into a bit of a chore. Of course, sometimes you get a bit of a break, such as with the – still active – MMORPG Ultima Online , when the disc for the 1998 The Second Age expansion contained a stand-alone demo. This also meant a (stripped-down) server which has been gratefully reverse-engineered by the community, with [draxinar] now claiming to have made the most complete server based on this demo server.

To make things extra challenging, the originally written in C++ server binary was reverse-engineered into C99 code , meaning that the use of classes and associated vtables had to be left intact, just without the critter comforts provided by C++.

The total process took about a decade with occasional progress, with the current server binary being mostly identical to a 1998-era Ultima Online server.…