6. Nov 2025 | Douglas DeMaio | CC-BY-SA-3.0

Community developers plan to bring new life to classic 1990s video games by reviving and reverse engineering some classic games during a project during Hack Week 25.

The project calls on participants to select an older game, analyze its data formats and underlying rules, and write a clean-room engine capable of running the original assets.

Many games from the era are simple enough that contributors can produce a playable prototype within the week.

The classic-games project, which has grown over multiple years, has titles such as Master of Orion II, Chaos Overlords, and Signus: The Artifact Wars.

Work on Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares, regarded as one of the defining 4X strategy games of the 1990s, has become the project’s flagship effort. Developers have decoded savegame formats, resource files and interface screens across several Hack Weeks. The current open-source engine can load original save files and display galaxy and fleet data, but other systems like ship design, colony management and research still require some reverse engineering.

The team working on Chaos Overlords identified resource formats, mapped much of the logic and begun developing a Qt-based interface resembling the original’s mouse-driven design. The game’s AI remains one of the toughest puzzles. Contributors calling it critical to the game’s identity.

Earlier efforts include Signus: The Artifact Wars, a Czech turn-based strategy title open-sourced in 2003. Developers continue to refine support for original file formats and work toward packaging improvements for openSUSE.

Participants frequently suggest new candidates and companies and Individuals are encouraged to join. The invitation to bring together contributors mirrors the spirit of another Hack Week 25 effort underway this year: a project to bring missing YaST features into Cockpit and System Roles following YaST’s deprecation from openSUSE Leap 16.0.

Hack Week, which began in 2007, has become a cornerstone of the project’s open-source culture. Hack Week has produced tools that are now integral to the openSUSE ecosystem, such as openQA, Weblate and Aeon Desktop. Hack Week has also seeded projects that later grew into widely used products; the origins of ownCloud and its fork Nextcloud derive from a Hack Week project started more than a decade ago.

For more information, visit hackweek.opensuse.org.