Mad TV Recompiled

A native Windows and Linux port of the DOS game Mad TV (Rainbow Arts, 1991), without DOSBox. All 557 functions of the original MTV.EXE were decompiled and translated into C; graphics, input, timer and the AdLib sound driver run on SDL2 and the Nuked-OPL3 emulator. Game logic, AI and the savegame format follow the release version of Mad TV (its changes over the first version are listed in re/notes/release_changes.md).

This is an AI-assisted port: analysis, translation and most of the debugging were done by Claude (Anthropic), goals, decisions and testing by a human. Every deviation from the original is marked with a PORT comment in the source.

Playing

Download from Releases: MadTV-Recompiled-<version>-windows.exe or MadTV-Recompiled-<version>-linux (64 bit, Ubuntu 22.04 / Debian 12 or newer; chmod +x first). Single file, game data included, no installation.

• Menu bar: Game (new game, pause, speed, Control Center switches, quit), Settings (language, fullscreen), Help. In fullscreen, Alt shows it.
• Keys: Space pause, F10 language, F11 or Alt+Enter fullscreen.
• Command line as in the original: D/E picks the language for this start, stars in the second argument multiply the computer players' starting capital (e.g. MadTV-Recompiled… E ***).
• Game mechanics (ratings, prices, ads, news, transmitters, credit), derived from the code: wiki/ (German).
• Savegames (original format) and settings.ini: %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Mad TV Recompiled on Windows, ~/.local/share/Mad TV Recompiled on Linux.

Deviations from the original concern presentation only: V-Sync with smooth cursor, elevator and scrolling, time-based screen transitions, scaling to 4:3, the music switch acting immediately, and fixes for a few out-of-bounds reads of the original.

Building

The repository contains no game data. Put the two archives from the release version of Mad TV into gamedata/: SOURCE1.RSC, SOURCE2.RSC. Every build embeds them (tools/make_bundle.py). The tables and texts of the original data segment are part of the source (src/game/ds_init.c); MTV.EXE is only needed for mingw32-make dscheck, which compares them byte by byte with the original.

Windows – MSYS2 with mingw-w64-i686-gcc, -SDL2, -cmake, -ninja and Python 3:

mingw32-make            # build/madtv.exe (development build)
mingw32-make test       # tests
mingw32-make release    # build/release/MadTV-Recompiled-<version>-windows.exe (static, reduced SDL)

Linux – make linux on the host (cmake, ninja, X11/Wayland/GL/audio development packages), or for releases in an Ubuntu 22.04 container (podman/docker) so that it runs with older glibc:

sh tools/build_linux.sh  # build/ubuntu2204/linux/MadTV-Recompiled-<version>-linux

Without embedded game data – add EMBED=0 to any of the commands above (no gamedata/ needed; file names end in -nodata). The program then reads SOURCE1.RSC and SOURCE2.RSC from its own folder and tells the player if they are missing.

Layout

Path	Content
src/game/	translated original code (seg_XXXX.c = code segment of MTV.EXE, ds_init.c = its data segment)
src/	platform layer, runtime library, sound driver, menu bar
tools/	data bundling, SDL build scripts, tests
res/	icon and version resource
re/	reverse engineering notes and tools (beta/release comparison, data segment extraction)
third_party/	Nuked-OPL3, tinf, stb_truetype, Noto Sans

Source comments are in German; TRANSLATION.md describes the translation rules.

Licenses

Nuked-OPL3 © Nuke.YKT (LGPL-2.1), SDL2 (zlib), tinf © Joergen Ibsen (zlib), stb_truetype © Sean Barrett (public domain / MIT), Noto Sans © The Noto Project Authors (OFL 1.1); see third_party/. Mad TV is © 1991 Rainbow Arts.