Ultima Underworld. About 5 birds with one stone: game dev, reverse engineering, real mode X86 assembly (covered a subset of ARM in college), technical details of DOS, OpenGL graphics, and a dip into writing software renderers too.
I consider it a long-term hobby; it's not exactly a quick solo project.
I'm also looking at another one called Solar Winds. It came out at a similar time, but the whole game is smaller than just UW's binary, with a lot more of the game's content encoded directly in the binary. UW tends toward deep call stacks, and significant portions are written in C. SW is pretty flat with very few function calls, and I think that about 1/3 of the code is made of Sound Blaster drivers linked into the binary.
I took a look at Lemmings, but that was going to be kind of annoying. Most of the binary was encrypted and would be decrypted on the fly, sometimes in a 2-step operation, where it would be decrypted then copied backwards into a new location. There are already engine implementations for that, so it didn't seem worth the effort.
I consider it a long-term hobby; it's not exactly a quick solo project.
I'm also looking at another one called Solar Winds. It came out at a similar time, but the whole game is smaller than just UW's binary, with a lot more of the game's content encoded directly in the binary. UW tends toward deep call stacks, and significant portions are written in C. SW is pretty flat with very few function calls, and I think that about 1/3 of the code is made of Sound Blaster drivers linked into the binary.
I took a look at Lemmings, but that was going to be kind of annoying. Most of the binary was encrypted and would be decrypted on the fly, sometimes in a 2-step operation, where it would be decrypted then copied backwards into a new location. There are already engine implementations for that, so it didn't seem worth the effort.