A clean-room reconstruction programme for DreamWeb DOS, combining deterministic format archaeology, a behavioral oracle and a new Godot runtime.
Mission profile
- Inventory and verify every original source file before transforming any of it.
- Extract formats deterministically, with provenance recorded for each produced artifact.
- Build a behavioral oracle and differential traces before writing a runtime.
- Reimplement in Godot with complete progression and a modern interface.
- Never distribute the original DOS data.
Architecture
Verified state
What exists and has been exercised at the time of writing.
- A verified inventory of 103 original source files.
- Deterministic extraction with recorded provenance.
- 6,619 PNG images, 120 WAV files and 51 room renders produced locally by the tooling.
- 18 documented unit tests.
- Phase P01 complete, awaiting audit.
- The P03 Godot runtime foundation is starting.
- Target: complete progression, behavioral fidelity and a modern interface.
Stated limits
What this project is not, written here so nobody has to discover it later.
- This is not a playable game yet, and not even a vertical slice.
- P02 (oracle and traces), P03 (runtime), full conversion and progression are still to be built.
- P01 is complete but has not been audited.
- The extracted images, audio and room renders derive from original data and are deliberately absent from this site.
- The original DOS data is never distributed.
Read before you rebuild
The first milestone did not produce a game. It produced certainty: a verified inventory of the original files, a deterministic extraction path, provenance for every artifact, and unit tests that make the extraction reproducible instead of anecdotal. A reconstruction that starts by guessing spends the rest of its life debugging the guess.
An oracle, not an opinion
The next phase builds a behavioral oracle and differential traces, so the new runtime can be compared against recorded original behavior rather than against a developer's memory of it. ScummVM is pinned as a technical reference for reading the era, not as a source of code to copy.
What is deliberately missing from this page
Thousands of sprites, audio files and room renders exist locally. None of them appear here, because they derive from original data whose rights have not been cleared for publication. A preservation programme that leaks its evidence onto a marketing page has already failed its own doctrine.