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Comments (36)

• brookst
  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.
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  CoolestBeans
  > 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.
• Kuyawa
  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' memoriesIt 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 completelyI 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 lifetimesCoding 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
• ridiculous_leke
  Halo running in WASM at 120 FPS over a browserhttps://x.com/mitchellhynes/status/2104658015605379094
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  bobajeff
  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.
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  anonymous908213
  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.pngYes, 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?
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  0x000xca0xfe
  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...
• ticulatedspline
  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.
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  georgeecollins
  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.
• carterschonwald
  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 arehaving that precise a grounding is literally what llms thrive in, esp across compactions.
• zug_zug
  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
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  AdeptusAquinas
  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.
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  keeda
  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=49652089In 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.
• anon
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