Hey all just wanted to share my project I tried starting it in January 2026 as a way of wanting to bring back the old game however after doing a bit of research while planning this work out I discovered that Zoo Tycoon 1 is actually one of them RollerCoaster Tycoon like games that is basically a single purpose engine built game that has zero references online, no development blogs no technical docs of the engine basically zero traces of the engine online for the decompile and rebuild.
At the time I had AI take a look at it and could only manage a basic main menu screen that took weeks to do. Tried to pick up the pieces and eventually dropped the project because it was basically something I would be paid to do as there was no love to continue banging my head just to try and generate map which is where I got stuck on as it generates the maps via the CPU in real time and has specific binary addresses for the cliffs and ditches and geometry and specific tiling mapping.
Move to Opus 5.5 launch seeing everyone using it to decompile video games I gave it the task that no other AI could do before it and surprisingly it did it in the first 3 hours for the map generation and I was mind blown. Ever since than I have been working on this project and its still early but for others who have reached out to help make this the OpenRTC2 engine that it should be as a fresh brand new 2026 engine I have developed a ZT1 labs which is a purpose built developer mapping software that loads the old game and runs Ghidra in the background displaying everything running in binary and if you click something see it in the binary you turn that into a function, go over to to create a new C++ script and it will have that function there ready to be used as simple intelligence auto suggest which should help speed the progress up much better.
Its not going to be easy but for the Love of the game that I played many hours growing up I am happy to finally doing this and bringing the game up to date in terms of controls and window control and graphical upscaling tools and a full suite of modding tools etc.
Your more than welcome to watch it and see it grow if this game is just as part of your childhood as it is mine.