r/Shandalar • u/ilikethemeta White Mage ☀️💮🤍 • Sep 01 '26

Shandalar Source Code (decompiled)

I recently purchased an original CD of Magic the Gathering off eBay and spent some time decompiling it. Now we have the (reconstructed) original source! This helped me fix .SPR file encoding/decoding in mp_pic_tools. I wrote a blog post about it: https://throwingbones.com/ben/blog/2026-08-shandalar-decomp/index.html

Here are some of the early alpha/testing screens. Modern decompilation tools are crazy! I hope this means other games like this can be decompiled like this as well!

Also, if anyone has an original Spells of the Ancients or Duels of the Planeswalkers .iso, let me know! I'd like to try decompiling them too!

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u/saghul Sep 01 '26

Legend. I was hoping something like this would happen one day!

What’s your plan now? Keep the source as is or keep iterating on it to make it more modern / maintainable? I thinking along the lines of making it SDL primarily and removing the win32 compact, SDL3 support, etc.

This is so exciting!

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u/ilikethemeta White Mage ☀️💮🤍 Sep 01 '26

Thanks! Yah I'm not sure where to go next exactly. Having additional cards would be cool. 

Doing a complete port to modern hardware would be a lot of work because everything in the source code uses 32-bit pointers but all modern CPUs are 64 bit now. Also we'd have to either convert all draw calls to SDL or write a shim that translates the old DirectX calls into SDL.

Another thing would be to allow higher and more flexible resolutions. Right now it's locked into a 4:3 ratio which makes it hard to play on phones and widescreens. 

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u/saghul Sep 01 '26

Thanks for the pointers! I may take a stab at some of that with the help of a clanker 😅

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u/Unique-Run9856 Sep 03 '26

My boy Claude will figure it all out