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  • Hacker News
  • AI giveth and AI taketh away
    by pluc
  • Honest question: Anybody has more details how to do this? I.e. I have my favorite game from the DOS/Win95 era I want to port plus a dev background - how to get started with AI reverse engineering?
    by littlecranky67
  • Opus doesn't push back against this kind of thing for reasons like "not your code"?
    by swingboy
  • I wonder if Rockstar will release GTA VI on PC a year after the console again.

    If they wait too long, perhaps the community will produce a better port before them.

    by user43928
  • Reminds me of my recent vibe coding project of porting Winamp AVS to web using Emscripten. It worked so well that it was simply.. done after a few sessions, and I was amazed and also feeling fuzzy in the head.

    One turn involved ChatGPT explicitly fixing C++ source code to fix beat detection for the available audio sources after I complained that it was broken.

    Hands down, sure, the most respectable work, apart from the original AVS code, was done by the Emscripten contributors. Anyway, it readjusted my expectations, even after my day job switched to agentic coding as the primary development tool.

    by moritzwarhier
  • I'd really like to know what the workflow for this is. In terms of the prompt, but also specifically in terms of which part of the decompilation process the model is using- I assume a standard decompiler is used, then what happens? How is the code rebuilt, what are the possible mistakes the AI can make, and what does the result actually look like?
    by awongh
  • My heads exploding. I expected to try Quake and just run through the first level and maybe stop. Being dropped into a multiplayer game and it feeling as good as it did was a jaw dropping moment for me. Quake 3, same experience... my ping wasn't great.

    I don't know where my quake cds are. Even if I found them I'd have to figure out what mods to run to have it feel good. Then I'd have to find communities to play with.

    This is super cool to me.

    by cjstewart88
  • I don't really understand the IP protection angle here: These browser ports are no more or less illegal that hosting a RAM file for use on an emulator, or pirated software in general. And sites hosting them are no harder or easier to shut down than existing piracy sites.

    What's more interesting is the new ability to easily create ports of old games that let you play old games legally: Bringing your copy of the original's data files and playing on a modernised engine with high-resolution, unlocked FPS, bugfixes, etc. In the past couple of months, I've seen a bunch of vibe-coded ports of DOS games for which the source code was lost.

    by sobiolite

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