The project
The Lost Engines Project is a not-for-profit organisation that reverse engineers abandonware game engines and publishes detailed technical analyses and open source reconstructions.
The Lost Engines Project seeks not only to preserve, but reinvigorate interest, in technologically innovative game engines of the golden age of PC gaming, chiefly the 1990s and early 2000s. The project combines software archeology, reverse engineering, and high quality code development, building extensive original tooling to aid in analysis of largely forgotten game engines, and create technical showcases demonstrating their capabilities and unique quirks.
The game plan
Each reverse engineered game engine is reproduced as a clean-sheet idiomatic modern C++ implementation written from scratch, but rigorously tested to be a completely faithful, pixel-perfect reproduction of the original. This then serves as an open source base for community improvements, and Lost Engines' own Redux versions - high resolution, increased render detail, modern input, bug fixes, etc - while opening the door for significant player-made modifications and expansions of previously closed and abandoned games.
Background
The project is still in its early days, founded in 2026 by Eugene Hopkinson (aka SlowRiot), and is likely to evolve in its aims and methods as time goes on.
The current focus is on classic abandonware DOS games featuring innovative 3D engines - these have some of the most interesting technical innovations to explore from the time, are reasonably compact and straightforward to reverse engineer, and are frequently either abandoned by their original developers or have been freely released to the public due to their age. In some cases, original source for the games has also become available, but in every case reverse engineering is still the primary approach to guarantee perfect behaviour reproduction, with reimplementation always a clean page design, referring to the original source as just one more reference point.
Beyond software emulation
A major part of the atmosphere of such games is their sound and music, and games from this era commonly used synthesised music played by hardware sound cards, each of which had their own unique characteristics and foibles, and distinctive feel.
Simply emulating basic FM sound in Dosbox frequently fails to capture the nuance and character of music that would have been heard on real hardware at the time, and for this reason the Lost Engines Project pays special attention to music and sound emulation - going as far as reverse engineering multiple different soundcard hardware setups for full internal emulation, decompiling original ROMs for reference, and simulating those details of game interaction with soundcards that traditional Dosbox emulation simply can't achieve at present. Many of these games are worth playing just for the music alone!
Making the most of AI
The Lost Engines Project makes the most of the force multiplier capabilities enabled by recent frontier AI models, which for the first time in history make it possible to not just emulate but truly understand closed source code and data.
While tracing the exact flow of a program, machine instruction by machine instruction, has always been possible by hand - and many entirely human reverse engineers have achieved amazing things by such a technique alone - modern AI permits this process to be sped up by many orders of magnitude, achieving in weeks the sort of work that would take an unassisted human decades. As such, we're at a unique time in history to be able to launch a project of this sort.
Nonetheless, an expert engineer hand is required at every stage to guide these models effectively, and guarantee the highest quality of work - not just AI slop. The human team's game development and expert software engineering background remains essential to this mission.
Support
Being entirely not-for-profit, the Lost Engines Project welcomes volunteer contributors, and depends entirely on voluntary sponsorship. The majority of our tooling and work is open source on GitHub, and access to cutting edge internally developed tooling and in depth disassembly steps, along with previews and insights on upcoming development, are available to project supporters on Patreon.
We rely on donations of computing resources and infrastructure from our partners - if you represent an organisation that wishes to support the preservation of classic gaming, please get in touch to see what we can do for each other, and get your name listed on our sponsors page.