Things I'd like to have a go at but don't really know where to start

ideas.md

1. Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Final Unity game engine recreation

   I like this game, but right now if you own it and want to play it you need to set up DOSbox, and that's lame. All its data files seem to be stored in a single directory on the CD, so an executable which can read those would be very cool.

   Prior art: There's an okay resource for file formats but its focus is on data dumping, so there's no documentation that I can find on which files constitute behaviour and how they're arranged. There's also this unfinished attempt to implement the game in ScummVM, but since it's written in C++ it's basically gibberish and the impetus to finish it dissolved when DOSbox gained support for the original.

2. Magic: the Gathering simulator

   Magic is fun^{[citation needed]}, but playing it online sucks. Wizards of the Coast has actually put effort into a couple pieces of software that simulate the effect of playing Magic and present a variety of colourful flashes and sparkles to distract you from the fact all your money is draining from your bank account into theirs in order to continue playing.

   If you'd rather keep your money to yourself, but you want the computer to enforce the rules, your only option is Xmage. Xmage is old, and it shows it: it's a giant Java monster, looks like crap, and doesn't seem to have enough developers to adequately maintain it. (They manage to implement new cards, but larger refactors like the semi-recent change to continuous effects or making the server not leak memory until it starts emitting spurious errors and has to be restarted seem to fall by the wayside.) By contrast, Yu-Gi-Oh has a speedy and decent-looking simulator written in C++ which is arguably better for playing the game than playing in paper.

3. Power Chess executable replacement

   It's probably a hard sell to get anyone to care about chess software in a world where you can just pull up Chess Dot Com or Lichess on your phone, but I have a soft spot for Power Chess because it is (as far as I can tell) the only chess program that talks to you. The Power Chess Queen (voiced by Natacha LaFerriere) would analyse your games and suggest improvements, or just narrate some notable historical games. Unfortunately it's 16-bit software and awkward to run on modern machines; being able to use the existing data files (and probably replace the WChess engine with Stockfish) would be really nice.