Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

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Your blog entry:

https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html

is wild!

I love the idea. I used Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 to get back to compile an old DOS game I wrote back around 1991 and for which I had lost the tooling (compiler / linker / notes / build files). It was on my todo list since years, decades even, but I never got to it. With a LLM it was easy: I didn't let the LLM do everything, I used it to find what needed fixing (like two macros I had used with names that were now clashing with "modern" compilers methods names etc.).

> I hacked together the art using my terrible Gimp skills and some Public Domain and Creative Commons assets from OpenGameArt

IMO AI models are better at generating pictures than at writing code, in that pictures do tolerate sloppy approximations. While code doesn't tolerate slop that much.

Why not use AI for the assets?

> IMO AI models are better at generating pictures than at writing code, in that pictures do tolerate sloppy approximations.

So does code. You can have poorly written code that runs slow but gets the job done because modern machines are powerful enough to make up the difference. (cough the majority of electron apps cough).

You’re definitely going to get dinged more for AI art. People can’t see the code, but they can see the art - that’s their first experience with the game unless the code is so bad that it literally causes visible bugs.

I work heavily in the generative space and while standalone AI art has come a long way, maintaining visual consistency in sprite assets across an entire game still needs a ton of hand holding particularly if you require animated sprite assets without them looking "uncanny valley".

That's a great idea! Just haven't gotten that far yet (that article is pre-LLM, and I'm very early in a new AI-driven reconstruction). But yeah, taking the original extracted sprites and having Nano Banana upscale or redraw them is a great idea.

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