The embedding of the story within what was almost entirely free-form exploration & adventure across a huge galaxy was masterful.

You could feel how close the creators were to the edge of what was possible with the save game system: Basically, the disk was a memory image. As you played the game would rewrite itself, so if you got stuck there was no “reset”. The documentation was emphatic: Only play with a copy of the original disk!!

> The reason is that Starflight was written in Forth

I recently reverse-engineered another game from the 80's, and had a similar issue because it was written with Turbo Pascal.

The different tools didn't like quirks such as data stored inline between the instructions or every library function having a different calling convention.

Turns out the simplest way to handle this was to write my own decompiler, since Turbo Pascal 3 didn't do any optimisations.