   TSO Emu (The Sims Online Emulator)
  Released by EA on December 17th 2002, The Sims Online was many years ahead of it's time. It was an installment in The Sims series which allowed it's players to interact with each other in an MMO-style environment. However, it's subscription fee and limited trial period meant that it failed to attract the userbase it needed to sustain itself. In March 2007, TSO was rebranded as EA-Land, but EA had already made too many changes and a series of bad decisions which led to the servers being shut down on August 1 2008.Now, there are so many people who still want the game, it seems strange that so little has been done about it. There have been official petitions and even a restoration project known as TSO Restoration, but development appears to be painfully slow, and they seem to be attempting to rebuild the entire game from scratch (server, client engine), something which will probably take years and will never be the same as what TSO once was.So, a few weeks ago, I started disassembling and reverse engineering parts of the TSO client to see what makes it tick. After some careful examination and analysis of packet logs and some basic packet decryption, I now have all of the basic framework in place for a TSO server emulator. It will use the same client and engine software, the same art, the same animations, the same UIs, it will all be familiar to anyone who has ever played TSO/EA-Land, but it will be running on a private server. Our website is at http://www.tsoemu.co.cc. I've already made quite a bit of progress:This is a screenshot of me just getting the original TSO update utility to work (I had to extract and reverse engineer the code from the client, but it was fairly low security so it didn't take too long.)I got the world selection/preliminary login interfaces working again! Some features are not yet working, and will probably have to be recoded from scratch, but this is a good start!
  I almost forgot to say... I hope to bring you guys a playable demo showing off basic functionality (where you can login, create a Sim, visit lots, walk around, chat etc.) within about a month or so. All of the software (including the TSO client) will be included in the demo, so you do not have to have purchased or downloaded the original TSO to play it. It'll also be completely free .Obviously it'll take a lot longer to get TSO Emu back to the state that TSO was in before it shut down, but the demo is just for people who want to see how we're doing, or people who miss the old game and just want to relive the TSO experience!   ;  I'm afraid we can't allow advertising of projects which infringe upon existing intellectual property unless you can satisfactorily demonstrate that you have permission to use the IP in question.As such, I'm going to have to close your topic.   