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I don't think we ever defined how the thrusters worked, but they do look like some kind of high-density plasma rocket.

I don't have any special dispensation for having worked on it since still doesn't legally belong to me.  I do, however, own two retail boxed copies (one original edition and one gold edition) so I think I'm covered.   

I thought you were ditching software?

Eventually. 

The terrain uses a 12-bit integer representation for height, so there's a minimum altitude of zero and maximum altitude of 409.5 meters.  The waves start out small, but add up when a bunch of them overlap.  Clamping the terrain so it can't wrap around did fix it.

It's not impossible, but it would take a significant amount of work.  Would it need to work in software mode too?

Yes, that does tend to bring down the Banhammer.  

The prepackaged installer is still technically illegal, even if Activision and Atari don't seem to care.  You also miss out on the atmospheric soundrack of the CD version.

(For the record, I test with both a patched retail Battlezone CD install and a Battlezone 1998 install since those are common install scenarios.)

Thanks!  This build was pretty wonky, but the problems have been straightened out for the most part.  I have a few things to finish up before posting another build.

That pillar came from terrain height being driven below zero altitude, where it would wrap around to 409.5 meters.  Stacked waves drove the terrain further down, increasing the likelihood of that happening.

It's nice and readable, but the text gets cut off in the lower left planet info.

Not deliberately

I screwed that up while trying to streamline the shell a bit, since it previously enumerated fonts every time it printed text.  That's extraordinarily wasteful, so I pushed the enumeration to the initial set-up code where it only gets done once.  The folks at battlezone1.net spotted that one too, among other things.

Correct.  The bzone.exe.pdb goes with bzone.exe.

I just updated the build to fix the smoke and z-buffer problems, so give it a try.

Battlezone 2 started with the game logic from Battlezone 1 transplanted from the Interstate 76 engine to the Dark Reign 2 engine, but changed drastically over the next year and a half.  Little, if anything, carried forward unchanged.

That would explain a lot... 

The Weapon hardpoint matrix was only invalid for the brief interval between mission load and the first Control phase.  AI is almost never in an active combat state the first frame after loading, so it almost never mattered.  This was one of the few cases where it did.