Snail Mail

Snail Mail (Sandlot Games, 2004) puts you in charge of Turbo, a snail who delivers the mail at breakneck speed along highways in space: grab the packages, dodge the salt, blast the slugs and don't fall off.

This project rebuilds the game from its original Windows executable, one function at a time, so it plays again in a modern browser.

▶ Play at snail.banteg.xyz

Playing

The game runs in desktop browsers; the first visit downloads about 9 MB. Click once to start (browsers keep sound off until you do), and the intro plays from the beginning.

• Controls: steer Turbo with the mouse and hold the mouse button to shoot. Escape opens the in-game menu. The tutorial, at the top of the New Game menu, walks you through packages, salt, hearts, weapons and invincibility.
• Saves: progress, options and high scores stay in your browser between visits. Add ?reset to the address to start over, or ?mute to play silently (?mute=0 turns sound back on).

Original or Ultimate

The ⚙ button in the corner picks how the game plays. Switching reloads the page, and each keeps its own progress and high scores.

• Ultimate (the default) is the most complete Snail Mail: every course and track style from the later Android release, its ten-level Pro-Challenge galaxy, its rules and pacing, and fixes for the original's bugs, with the PC's art, voices and mouse controls.
• Original is the 2004 PC release exactly as it shipped, its quirks included. It is checked tick for tick against the original program.

Comfort options

The same menu has options that change only how the game looks and feels; all start on:

• Sharp rendering draws at your display's resolution instead of 640×480.
• Fullscreen lets the game's own Fullscreen option fill the screen.
• Trap the mouse keeps the pointer inside the game; Escape lets it go.

Playing natively

The same build also runs in a native window on macOS (SDL3), with your own copy of the game files. See Playing natively.

How it works

The project is a matching decompilation of the gameplay executable: C++ source written to compile, with the original Microsoft Visual C++ 6 compiler, into byte-identical machine code. The playable port compiles that recovered source for WebAssembly and replaces only the original's platform layer: Direct3D 8 and the BASS audio library are emulated underneath it, so the game logic is the original's own.

• Matching: 646 of 662 game functions are byte-proven against the original, and the other 16 are close partials (STATUS.md).
• Original, checked against the original: two oracles compare the port with the 2004 executable tick by tick, and both match bit for bit: 20 of 20 recorded high-score runs, and 10 of 10 sessions captured from the original (56,977 ticks of menus, tutorial, postal, challenge and time trial play).
• Ultimate, checked against Android: snail android trace runs the Android release's own game library headless and compares what it builds and draws with the port. See Gameplay profiles and Oracles.
• Next: comparing rendered frames with the original, native builds for Linux and Windows, and 64-bit builds (port plan).

Contributing

Matching help is welcome: pick a function from the matching challenges; partial improvements and new findings count too.

• DEVELOPING.md: local setup, daily workflow, validation commands and contribution rules.
• decomp/README.md: the recovered source, one file per function in link-order units.
• tools/match/README.md: the matching harness, toolchain setup and the no-fakematching rules.
• docs/port/README.md: the port, its profiles, patches and oracles.
• docs/index.md: original formats and reverse-engineering notes.

The matching target is hosted publicly and kept out of Git. From a fresh checkout, fetch and verify it with:

uv run tools/match/fetch_target.py

That saves SnailMail_unwrapped.exe (724 KiB, SHA-256 verified) to artifacts/bin/; no game installation or login is needed. Asset work and the port also need SnailMail.dat from the original game in artifacts/bin/, and Ultimate needs SnailMailExtras.dat, built by uv run snail port extras from the Android release.

uv run snail match status --write tools/match/STATUS.md
tools/match/match.sh tools/match/scratches/<function>
uv run pytest

To build and play the port locally:

uv run snail port link && uv run snail port data
cd port && zig build && cd ..
uv run snail port serve

Public reporting policy · Library and ownership findings