STARS!VM is a custom virtual machine that embeds an 80286 emulator and a Win16-to-Win32 compatibility bridge to run the 1995 4X game Stars! as a native Win32 program on modern Windows. Signed releases on GitHub ship a single compressed EXE containing the original 16-bit game, providing a modern file chooser, 4k scaling, correct taskbar and filesystem behavior, and neutralized copy protection. The bridge maps 16-bit handles to host handles, translates struct layouts, services DOS interrupts, and copies data between guest memory and the host, making the experience indistinguishable from a genuine port while remaining a contained, ready-to-play executable (32-bit builds requiring SSE2).
The emulator executes x87 floating-point operations on host hardware and is validated with a differential fuzzer. It exposes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) so external agents can inspect and drive the UI; an AI (Opus 5) played a full game via MCP. Performance work targeted turn generation: traces identified hot routines, which were reverse-engineered with Fable 5.1, reimplemented in C, and injected as new 80286 instructions for ~2x speedup; I/O is buffered and WaveMix.dll interfaces are implemented natively. A custom LZ compressor halves the embedded game size to ~1.5MB, and the VM injects a fixed serial and hardware signature to avoid copy-protection penalties. Source builds use w64devkit, and the project is positioned to enable easy modding.
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