I'm actually glad to see it stumbled in a few areas. Always surprised to see how much it gets right though. I had always hoped the rather obscure parts of computer history and games would be this incredibly difficult area for Agents to mine.
The amount of non standard hackish and obtuse things that had to be done to implement things in the past feel impossibly complicated to touch today. Lots of people made it up as they went along and used the hardware in ways no one expected. Reminds me of Tim Follin doing the audio for Plock on SNES and Miamoto being shocked the audio was real. It would be so interesting to see what we could learn about development of the past from agentic insights into how code was constructed. I love stuff like this an appreciate the in depth post.
This is fantastic. It would be interesting to have Claude Code export an engineering guide for doing similar ports, including descriptions of the tooling it built to do it. I've done some reversing from binary but never with results this good.
This is a great idea. It could be a generic game porting skill to make the porting experience smoother. After my experience above. I have actually tried giving Claude binary files of games and it was able to reverse engineer to GoDot!
> I have actually tried giving Claude binary files of games and it was able to reverse engineer to GoDot!
Oh wow...I hadn't even thought of trying something like this. There are soooo many games from that era that I'd love to play again without the hackery of emulation.
I really tried to start reading this because I am interested in the idea, but the obvious AI writing prose is just so off-putting that I can't force myself to continue reading it without my eyes rolling into the back of my head. I'm not against using AI to code, but if you're actually passionate about the project and want to share it with others, you should use your own words.
The amount of non standard hackish and obtuse things that had to be done to implement things in the past feel impossibly complicated to touch today. Lots of people made it up as they went along and used the hardware in ways no one expected. Reminds me of Tim Follin doing the audio for Plock on SNES and Miamoto being shocked the audio was real. It would be so interesting to see what we could learn about development of the past from agentic insights into how code was constructed. I love stuff like this an appreciate the in depth post.
I wonder, do you think we'd be better off asking you, or asking Claude?
Oh wow...I hadn't even thought of trying something like this. There are soooo many games from that era that I'd love to play again without the hackery of emulation.
Though I'd admit that using claude for a few hours every day this year desensitivized me to its prose :-)
Think of it as: this is a story that quite possibly would not be told without AI to help with the writeup.