Okay, so today I’m gonna talk about something I messed around with a bit ago – “master 1997”. It’s a pretty old thing, but I wanted to see what I could do with it.
First off, I grabbed the source code. You know, just a straight-up git clone from wherever it was hanging out. That part’s easy enough. Then, I tried to just compile it, like a normal person. Nope. Of course not. It’s ancient, remember? Build scripts were… different back then.
I stared at the Makefiles for a while. Looked like it was expecting some very specific versions of libraries that I definitely didn’t have. So, I had to figure out how to fake it. I started by trying to locate the closest versions of those libraries. Luckily, I had an old VM lying around.
I fired up the VM and began installing stuff. This was where it got tedious. I remember wrestling with dependencies. One library depended on another, which depended on something else entirely. It was a real rabbit hole. I ended up using `apt-get` for what I could, but a lot of things I had to build from source. Yeah, I’m talking about the dreaded `./configure`, `make`, `make install` dance. Took ages.
After hours of that, I finally managed to get all the dependencies sorted. Or, well, close enough. Then I went back to the original source and tried to build it again. More errors. This time, it was because the compiler was too new. Some of the old C code just wasn’t playing nice with modern compilers. I remember seeing something about deprecated functions and whatnot.
So, what did I do? I downgraded the compiler, of course! I found an older version that was closer to what the original code was expecting. That fixed a bunch of errors, but not all of them.
The next set of errors were more interesting. It turned out that some of the code was relying on features that were specific to the operating system it was originally written for. I’m talking about system calls and stuff. I had to wrap those calls in `#ifdef` statements and provide alternative implementations for my system. Basically, I was writing compatibility shims.
I’m not gonna lie, there were a few times when I just wanted to give up. But I kept going. Slowly, painstakingly, I patched the code, fixed the build scripts, and tweaked the environment until it finally compiled.
And then…it ran! Sort of. It crashed a lot. But it ran! I was so happy. I then started looking at the crashing issues and debugging. GDB became my best friend for a few hours. It turned out there were some memory issues, some null pointer dereferences, the usual suspects. I fixed those too.
In the end, I had a working version of “master 1997”. It wasn’t pretty, and it probably had more bugs than features, but it worked. I learned a ton about old build systems, C compilers, and the joys of dependency hell.
Here’s a rough list of the steps I took:
- Grabbed the source code.
- Tried to compile, failed miserably.
- Set up an old VM.
- Installed older versions of libraries and compilers.
- Patched the code to fix compatibility issues.
- Debugged the runtime errors.
- Celebrated (briefly) when it finally ran.
Was it worth it? Maybe not in a practical sense. But it was a fun challenge, and I learned a lot. Plus, now I can say I’ve wrestled with code older than some of the people I work with. That’s gotta count for something, right?
