A custom virtual machine brings the 1995 4X classic Stars! back to life on modern Windows
A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game for 16-bit Windows that can't run on modern x64 Windows. Developer Chris Wellons built Stars!VM, a custom 80286 emulator with a Win16-to-Win32 bridge, packaged as a single signed EXE that embeds the original game. It adds modern file dialogs, 4K scaling, and even MCP support so AI agents can play. Turn generation runs nearly twice as fast thanks to hand-optimized routines and buffered I/O.
Opus 5 played a complete game through MCP — which is quite fun to watch — requesting my assistance at just two points when it got stuck in the UI.
- em3rgent0rdr
> the authors couldn’t afford to build a sloppy, wasteful UI, and so by modern standards the game UI is remarkably fast and responsive. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.
I also miss this aspect of old windows games. "Castle of the Wind" the RPG is another example of a game that unashamedly uses Windows' built-in UI elements just fine. I wish more games just stuck to them. Then things like pressing tab to cycle focus to different UI elements still works and developers wouldn't have to worry about introducing bugs in their custom UIs.
- philipov
Wow, Stars! I loved this game so much as a child. Back then, after upgrading from shareware I had to wait for a floppy disk to arrive in the mail.
- programd
The star map screenshot looks very similar to star map in "Remnants of the Precursors" [1], which is a modernization of 1993 "Master of Orion" [2]. Convergent evolution, or was 1995 Stars! an homage/clone of Orion?
1. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/410970/Master_of_Orion_1/
- Espressosaurus
A pity Supernova was never finished. Stars! Without all the Econ micromanagement would have gotten rid of one of the bigger mechanical advantages someone with a lot of patience had.
- mike_hearn
Really cool effort but it might be better to just document the game mechanics really well, reimplement an open source version and then use it as a base to improve it, OpenTTD style. Stars! was fun for the day but had a lot of frustrating problems as well, in particular how much effort it required to complete a turn in the later stages due to the lack of automation features. And of course some nicer graphics wouldn't go amiss.
The hard part is knowing why exactly it was compelling despite apparently violating all the rules of good game design...