I recently came upon some school work of mine, code I wrote, from high school in 2001 as a sophomore.
For my high school CS101 class, I wrote a C++ game called Snake. The game was written using a graphics library called Allegro (https://www.allegro.cc/). Allegro was a lovely library.
It is still possible to download the original zipped binaries which I uploaded 19 years ago. They can be downloaded here: https://www.allegro.cc/depot/snake2
I also put them online here: https://github.com/natehouk/snake
(There is also a second game Mastermind available here https://github.com/natehouk/mastermind and here https://www.allegro.cc/depot/mastermind)
Unfortunately, I can not find the source code anywhere. I am very saddened by this. I thought it would be very fun to see code I wrote when I was 15, nearly 20 years ago. It would be especially fun to see how I've improved, or what neat tricks I came up with at that young age.
I have the .exe and the .dat data files and the original readme.txt. I have tried running my program on Windows 10 and with Wine. In both cases, the program crashes. I have tried all of the compatibility modes in Windows 10 and none of them work.
The year was 2001, so I believe we must have been using Windows 98 in the classroom, maybe Windows NT 2000? I can't remember.
I know that my program ran great back in the day. It even got 100,000 downloads off Download.com back then before cnet ruined them.
I want to play my game. What can I do to get my program running again? It seems like Allegro is barely supported these days. I think I need to try a native Windows 2000 install. Was it naive of me to think I would easily be able to run a program from nearly 20 years back?
What tools are available and what is state of the art for decoding a compiled binary back into readable source code?
Thanks for any info.