Begin 2 Shipeditor


The 1980's brought a shareware space combat game known as Begin by Tom Nelson and Mike Higgins. This game, offered a simple yet compelling tactical starship simulation where a player was pitted against one or more computer opponents, each with the same resources and abilities.

I wrote a tool that allows players to customize the ships that they play with in the begin single or multiplayer game. All patches are server-side, so you don't need to send your changes to anyone, just serve the appropriate game.


Download Begin2: A TCP/IP Tactical Starship Sim And Ship Editor

Using the ship editor

The first step is to export the stats from a begin game. Open a dos prompt (start, run, cmd.exe) and change into the beginmultiplayer directory you extracted

shipeditor.exe -mp -export mystats.csv dos\begin.exe

The -mp flag means the binary is suited for multiplayer with appropriate probe damage and begin1 style armaments with begin2 style damage. This saves all the stats into a .csv file.

Go ahead and open mystats.csv with excel and edit the stats to your satisfaction and save it to the same .csv file in comma separated format.


then run
shipeditor.exe -mp -import mystats.csv dos\begin.exe

and you have a modified begin.exe that has all your stats.
if you want to restore things to the default you can do

shipeditor.exe -default -mp -power.5 dos\begin.exe

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