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brookst 1 hours ago [-]
Tangentially, I have a very nice laser cutter with terrible software (xtool p3). Their electron app is a nightmare of poor usability and unwanted “value adds”, while basic stuff like defining order or paths to cut is somewhere between opaque and broken. And the process of exporting DXF, importing to their software, positioning, setting per-path power and speed… such a PITA.
It took claude an hour or two to reverse the gcode dialect and camera controls. Now I just tell it what to cut, load the material, and claude sorts out where to place the work, power, speed, variations for corners and stuff, and cuts. If there’s difficulty I pop the work on a scanner and claude diagnoses and adjusts.
It is going to be very hard to control anything that’s in consumer hands, whether for good or bad reasons.
CoolestBeans 4 hours ago [-]
> The act of reverse engineering and porting decades old games to modern environments requires a complex, deeply involved set of tasks from multiple disciplines... It's the quintessential deep, skilled knowledge labor profile out there that people understood as a career protected by depth of skill and knowledge acquisition.
Game development, especially this kind of porting, is an extremely technically demanding task. But it is far more constrained and precise in its requirements than the sort of software development that happens outside of the game world. Most developers deal with vague and (importantly for AI) unverifiable requirements that change continuously as a project develops. AI is not as good of a tool for this type of programming because unlike the tasks demonstrated in the article, there is no verification function an AI can cheaply use to validate if it is approaching completion of the task.
In the example in the article, the bots can look at the entire memory state of the game, interact with it to see how the state changes, and then repeat the process on their working copy of the port. So long as the overall behavior of the port is getting closer to the original, the AI can validate its getting closer to its goals. Extremely impressive stuff. But this verification loop exists in a closed world. No equivalent exists for most programming disciplines. No equivalent can exist because shifting the requirements to fulfill the vague business goals is an essential job of a software developer.
So while I am extremely impressed about what AI can accomplish every day, I also have a loud voice in the back of my mind skeptical of the actual economic impact. Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.
visarga 1 hours ago [-]
> But this verification loop exists in a closed world. No equivalent exists for most programming disciplines.
You can do N-version programming with coding agents and you get tests for free. It is easier to implement something than to test the same thing. This approach turns implementing into automated oracle for testing, takes less time (can implement in parallel), and every divergence between versions is either a bug fix or a requirement clarification. In order to make the N-versions more diverse we can use different model providers, programming language or libraries.
applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago [-]
> Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.
Game industry generates hundreds of billions in revenue. There is plenty of value in it. The value happens to not be in decompiling 80s/90s games you have no legal right to sell, of course.
georgeecollins 3 hours ago [-]
There is more value in remastering old games than you might think. And there always has been. One of my first gigs in the game industry was producing an Infocom Clasics CD-ROM at Activision. That’s games from the seventies and eighties re-released in the nineties.
ndiddy 2 hours ago [-]
Was it an issue that Infocom had been shut down? For example for making a version of the Z-Machine for Windows 95 or whatever was current. Did Activision have an archive of all the Infocom development stuff, or were you able to go off of whatever documentation fans had come up with when they were making unofficial Z-Machine interpreters?
georgeecollins 2 hours ago [-]
Activision bought Infocom. We did have an archive of the Infocom servers which was kind of amazing. I remember notes for an adventure game set on the Titanic. There was a design document for Leather Goddesses of Phobos II.
applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago [-]
If you have the rights to sell them, yes.
4 hours ago [-]
Agentlien 12 minutes ago [-]
I'm a programmer working with porting of video games.
This is absolutely mind-blowing. And at the same time definitely overblown.
This stuff is impressive, but reversing is specifically what these models seems best at and porting new games to weaker hardware is way tougher than this. Not to mention making new games.
Also, his modeling skill evaluation is crazy. This hasn't gone from junior to senior in weeks. The newest samples are barely junior level.
I ported Prince of Persia to Swift for MacOS [1] over the weekend using DeepSeek Harness, spent three hours in total, $3 in tokens, and got a playable and enjoyable game bringing back good ol' memories
It is a faithful port of Jordan Mechner's 1989 original game and the guiding idea was just one sentence: port the game exactly, rewrite the engine completely
I didn't write a single line of code or test, not even the readme. I don't know if it delivered swift, assembly or brainfvck as directed but the result is spectacular and I would never had done it in ten lifetimes
Coding is solved, human programming is dead, apps will cost close to zero and those who don't see the writing on the wall are hopeless
human programming sure is dead for translating content A to content B, this is the most appropriate use case for our current modelling of generative ai. translation is one field of many, did something in particular give you confidence that being good at translation implies universal applicability?
wonnage 51 minutes ago [-]
Maybe you should try reading the readme it wrote you.
bobajeff 4 hours ago [-]
Is not just games. I've already seen the beginnings of proprietary software such as Wolfram Engine and Microsoft Word vibed up into alternatives. How long till all of MS Office, Creative Cloud, Houdini get the same treatment? Truly exciting times.
brookst 1 hours ago [-]
Yep. And these companies know it. I’ve been in the room with execs candidly saying their billion-dollar cash cows will be easily replicated by a teenager on a weekend.
The sane ones recognize that sales, service, and support have value. Is that teenager going to ensure 24/7 operation for a multinational?
The less sane ones think “if one teenager can build MS office, our thousands of SWEs can make thousands of, uh, help me out here…”
le-mark 3 hours ago [-]
Yes then expand to popular saas like jira etc, then photoshop. The potential of this sort of disruption was priced into stocks as “saaspocalypss” about may 2026.
pandinus 1 hours ago [-]
Starflight 2 here I come!
0x000xca0xfe 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting, I did the same with an old RTS and it also worked very well.
But instead of cloning their assets and rewriting their code, a dynamic x86 to WASM JIT recompiler with some web platform support code proved fast enough to run the original binaries. It is even playable on an old Android smartphone in Firefox.
The final web player is ~600KB and only needs the game installer as input, so people still have to buy/possess the game. I think this is a lot fairer for the original devs...
debo_ 2 hours ago [-]
Which RTS is it? I'm a fan of the genre.
ticulatedspline 5 hours ago [-]
I think we're going to start seeing a huge avalanche of remakes and mods of classic games. I've been working on my own modding of a classic game I still play and the experience has been both fascinating and surprisingly fruitful.
Like most things the majority of these attempts will be garbage but some will certainly pan out into great new or extended experiences.
georgeecollins 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think reverse engineering a commercial game is legal. I don’t know if it is right or wrong, or if anyone can stop it.
stubish 2 hours ago [-]
This is one of the points he is making. It might not be legal, but it is certainly allowed with precedents being set in courts and policies being turned into law by politicians. He seems quite explicit in stating that what he is doing now with multiple 90s era games will be what happens with this years games next year, and IP protections are getting eroded at such a rate that even the big budget games get cloned with impunity. One of the quotes is about Rockstar's defense being a brand fortress and money.
Gonxa6282 3 hours ago [-]
Up to this point, it has never been actively stopped. Except for Take Two with the PS2 GTA games, but that was a cease & desist, so it's not determined as "illegal" either.
I think that it's legal as long as you're not decrypting stuff, but my understanding may be limited.
jagged-chisel 4 hours ago [-]
Might be against the contract, but that’s not illegal.
georgeecollins 4 hours ago [-]
Something tells me you are not a lawyer who specializes in IP law.
Joker_vD 14 minutes ago [-]
Which IP law? The EU has them somewhat different from the US, you know.
...The unauthorised reproduction, translation, adaptation or transformation of the form of
the code in which a copy of a computer program has been made available constitutes an
infringement of the exclusive rights of the author. Nevertheless, circumstances may exist
when such a reproduction of the code and translation of its form are indispensable to obtain
the necessary information to achieve the interoperability of an independently created program
with other programs. It has therefore to be considered that, in these limited circumstances
only, performance of the acts of reproduction and translation by or on behalf of a person
having a right to use a copy of the program is legitimate and compatible with fair practice
and must therefore be deemed not to require the authorisation of the rightholder. An objective
of this exception is to make it possible to connect all components of a computer system,
including those of different manufacturers, so that they can work together. Such an exception
to the author's exclusive rights may not be used in a way which prejudices the legitimate
interests of the rightholder or which conflicts with a normal exploitation of the program.
...Protection of computer programs under copyright laws should be without prejudice to the
application, in appropriate cases, of other forms of protection. However, any contractual
provisions contrary to the provisions of this Directive laid down in respect of decompilation
or to the exceptions provided for by this Directive with regard to the making of a back-up
copy or to observation, study or testing of the functioning of a program should be null and void.
...The person having a right to use a copy of a computer program shall be entitled, without
the authorisation of the rightholder, to observe, study or test the functioning of the
program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the
program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running,
transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do.
...In the absence of specific contractual provisions, the acts referred to in points (a) and (b)
of Article 4(1) [reproduction and alteration of the computer program — JvD] shall not require
authorisation by the rightholder where they are necessary for the use of the computer program by
the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction.
...The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and
translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable
to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created
computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met...
It's a very narrow exception, but it exists, and the the laws of the EU members follow this directive.
AdeptusAquinas 3 hours ago [-]
If they can argue its copyright infringement, then you can be sued for it. Sometimes you can get away with just a rebuild of the engine without the assets (do not try to copy the assets!) but even then its up to the company's lawyers if they want to push it. Certainly if you try to sell your remake things get spiky. Can look at all the legal disclaimers on things like OpenSAGE as an example. But plenty of companies are cool, as long as they see no competition to their own copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engine_recreation...
georgeecollins 2 hours ago [-]
There is also trademark law to consider.
carterschonwald 5 hours ago [-]
reversing into a faithful modern implementation has a very important detail. everything complicated has an unambiguous unique reference semantics. there is no decision making on observable behavior of a program, just what the internal details of replication are
having that precise a grounding is literally what llms thrive in, esp across compactions.
zug_zug 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe I missed this but to me the economic implications are obvious: net loss for game companies, neutral for ai companies, win for gamers probably
anonymous908213 1 hours ago [-]
Why do AI boosters always tell blatantly obvious lies? I guess the answer is because lying is rewarded, but then the question is: why does our society reward lying so heavily? Why does HN? You would think HN draws logically-focused, high-information users who enjoy facts. You would think.
Let's take this claim:
> the state of the art on 3d asset generation already changed dramatically. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol and finally Claude Opus 5.5 all moved closer into "Senior 3d artist territory"
I opened Codex, gave Astra Max access to Blender and a model, shaders, materials from Persona 5 and confirmed that it could work with it. Then I gave it reference artwork of an unrelated character and prompted it to use the Persona 5 model as a reference and model the new character in that style. The result: https://d.uguu.se/BOuGsmyR.png
Yes, it is nifty a language model can do anything at all with that prompt. But come now. Senior 3D artist. Give me a fucking break. Lie after lie after lie. Do you enjoy the feeling of clout you get from lying and people sharing your fabrications in a panic? Is that it?
I wish we could talk rationally about the capabilities of tools. Public discourse has degraded beyond reason. As one of the apparently extremely tiny minority of people who are grounded in reality, who objectively evaluates claims with their own two eyes, it is not very enjoyable to be bombarded with conversations from and between liars day in and day out. What is the purpose of this liars' society we have built?
brookst 1 hours ago [-]
> Why do AI boosters always tell blatantly obvious lies
> Public discourse has degraded beyond reason
I rest your case.
keeda 2 days ago [-]
Cross posting from another thread: 17 games fully or partially reversed and ported to the web by one very capable dude in a few weeks with frontier and open weight models. He also did this thing where he “spliced” different game concepts and turned WoW into an FPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652089
In case you mistake him for an “AI booster”, you should see this guy’s other posts, he is extremely critical of the AI frontier labs and Tech Bros and this whole AI bubble.
But he is also a very experienced game developer, and under his control the latest models have pulled off these crazy feats. What TFA is the analysis of a domain expert and what it means for the industry.
zahlman 7 hours ago [-]
Just so you know, the other submission you linked here got killed (i.e. is not visible without showdead on).
orangedog 7 hours ago [-]
Why was it killed? That sounds very interesting.
Does anybody have a link to it? I can't find it on the blog.
They're all [dead] (you'll need "showdead" on in your profile).
keeda 7 hours ago [-]
Whoa TIL. Too much low-quality stuff being cross-posted from LinkedIn?
Jtsummers 7 hours ago [-]
Lots of would-be business influencer types post (or posted? I've never paid much attention to it) on there. There are a number of other sites that are also auto-killed by the system. Sometimes those submissions will come back to life, but it has to be found by a mod or vouched for by enough users.
He mentions GTA a lot in this post. I feel if he reverse engineered and rebuilt GTA, then attempted to sell the result, that would be a fairly interesting case study in all the ways porting a game from the 80s to JS isn't quite the fait accompli for AI he thinks it is.
stubish 2 hours ago [-]
He is mentioning GTA a lot because the article is a warning to the big players. Today, you can repeatably clone games from 90s. Next year, Rockstar's moat against clones might be down to branding, lawyers and money. And the way the IP laws are going, lawyers might not be much help. And money might not help either if the clone is made by a behemoth like 10cent or Meta. Maybe Meta wants the Fortnight ecosystem but doesn't want to pay for Epic. Maybe 10cent wants a share of that GTA6 money and tweaks a GTA6 clone for the Asian market.
It took claude an hour or two to reverse the gcode dialect and camera controls. Now I just tell it what to cut, load the material, and claude sorts out where to place the work, power, speed, variations for corners and stuff, and cuts. If there’s difficulty I pop the work on a scanner and claude diagnoses and adjusts.
It is going to be very hard to control anything that’s in consumer hands, whether for good or bad reasons.
Game development, especially this kind of porting, is an extremely technically demanding task. But it is far more constrained and precise in its requirements than the sort of software development that happens outside of the game world. Most developers deal with vague and (importantly for AI) unverifiable requirements that change continuously as a project develops. AI is not as good of a tool for this type of programming because unlike the tasks demonstrated in the article, there is no verification function an AI can cheaply use to validate if it is approaching completion of the task.
In the example in the article, the bots can look at the entire memory state of the game, interact with it to see how the state changes, and then repeat the process on their working copy of the port. So long as the overall behavior of the port is getting closer to the original, the AI can validate its getting closer to its goals. Extremely impressive stuff. But this verification loop exists in a closed world. No equivalent exists for most programming disciplines. No equivalent can exist because shifting the requirements to fulfill the vague business goals is an essential job of a software developer.
So while I am extremely impressed about what AI can accomplish every day, I also have a loud voice in the back of my mind skeptical of the actual economic impact. Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.
You can do N-version programming with coding agents and you get tests for free. It is easier to implement something than to test the same thing. This approach turns implementing into automated oracle for testing, takes less time (can implement in parallel), and every divergence between versions is either a bug fix or a requirement clarification. In order to make the N-versions more diverse we can use different model providers, programming language or libraries.
Game industry generates hundreds of billions in revenue. There is plenty of value in it. The value happens to not be in decompiling 80s/90s games you have no legal right to sell, of course.
This is absolutely mind-blowing. And at the same time definitely overblown.
This stuff is impressive, but reversing is specifically what these models seems best at and porting new games to weaker hardware is way tougher than this. Not to mention making new games.
Also, his modeling skill evaluation is crazy. This hasn't gone from junior to senior in weeks. The newest samples are barely junior level.
https://x.com/mitchellhynes/status/2104658015605379094
It is a faithful port of Jordan Mechner's 1989 original game and the guiding idea was just one sentence: port the game exactly, rewrite the engine completely
I didn't write a single line of code or test, not even the readme. I don't know if it delivered swift, assembly or brainfvck as directed but the result is spectacular and I would never had done it in ten lifetimes
Coding is solved, human programming is dead, apps will cost close to zero and those who don't see the writing on the wall are hopeless
[1] https://github.com/kuyawa/prince
The sane ones recognize that sales, service, and support have value. Is that teenager going to ensure 24/7 operation for a multinational?
The less sane ones think “if one teenager can build MS office, our thousands of SWEs can make thousands of, uh, help me out here…”
But instead of cloning their assets and rewriting their code, a dynamic x86 to WASM JIT recompiler with some web platform support code proved fast enough to run the original binaries. It is even playable on an old Android smartphone in Firefox.
The final web player is ~600KB and only needs the game installer as input, so people still have to buy/possess the game. I think this is a lot fairer for the original devs...
Like most things the majority of these attempts will be garbage but some will certainly pan out into great new or extended experiences.
having that precise a grounding is literally what llms thrive in, esp across compactions.
Let's take this claim:
> the state of the art on 3d asset generation already changed dramatically. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol and finally Claude Opus 5.5 all moved closer into "Senior 3d artist territory"
I opened Codex, gave Astra Max access to Blender and a model, shaders, materials from Persona 5 and confirmed that it could work with it. Then I gave it reference artwork of an unrelated character and prompted it to use the Persona 5 model as a reference and model the new character in that style. The result: https://d.uguu.se/BOuGsmyR.png
Yes, it is nifty a language model can do anything at all with that prompt. But come now. Senior 3D artist. Give me a fucking break. Lie after lie after lie. Do you enjoy the feeling of clout you get from lying and people sharing your fabrications in a panic? Is that it?
I wish we could talk rationally about the capabilities of tools. Public discourse has degraded beyond reason. As one of the apparently extremely tiny minority of people who are grounded in reality, who objectively evaluates claims with their own two eyes, it is not very enjoyable to be bombarded with conversations from and between liars day in and day out. What is the purpose of this liars' society we have built?
> Public discourse has degraded beyond reason
I rest your case.
In case you mistake him for an “AI booster”, you should see this guy’s other posts, he is extremely critical of the AI frontier labs and Tech Bros and this whole AI bubble.
But he is also a very experienced game developer, and under his control the latest models have pulled off these crazy feats. What TFA is the analysis of a domain expert and what it means for the industry.
Does anybody have a link to it? I can't find it on the blog.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=linkedin.com
They're all [dead] (you'll need "showdead" on in your profile).
It works for me in an Incognito window, but YMMV.