Comment by gmerc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmerc | Hacker News Reader

It's a completely new world. Random retro games I ported to modern webgl/webgpu in the last few months:

- The Adventures of Robin Hood - Opus 4.7/Sonnet https://robin.tooclever.org

- Syndicate - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus ( https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/modern-game-port-syndi... )

- Kaiser 2

- Populous Plus - Sol/Luna 5.6/Opus

- Dragon Strike - (Fable 5.1 almost one shot)

- War of the Lance - Qwnen-3.7-27B-dense (got stuck, finished with) Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/what-reverse-engineeri...

- Dungeon Keeper - Various

- Red Baron - Opus 4.8, DeepSeek 4

- Test Drive 3 (Qwen-3.8-Flash Next, DeepSeek-4-Flash-exp, GLM-5.3-Flash)

- In progress Ultima 6 ... to 3d (Fable, GLM-5.3) ( https://this.os.isfine.org/#ultima6-atlas )

Some straight source ports (Kaiser), some full RE jobs (Dragon Strike, Test Drive, WOTL)

Some a mix of available sources (Syndicate, Populous)

Some of the findings are documented here: https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/

Let me add my elite clone - https://harmless.atomic14.com

I would like to see all of them :-)

One of the most difficult reverse-engineering projects from that era for me was Stunt Car Racer on the C64 (also ported to DOS). It features a highly optimized 8-bit 3D graphics and physics engine. Fable was the first one that was able to generate a complete port of the game.

Now I am trying of Flight Simulator 4 and Wing Commander 1. Then maybe Frontier Elite 2. So much fun ....

Please do not hesitate to share stunts, if you can

Stunt Car Racer from Geoff Crammond published by MicroProse, not Stunts from Distinctive Software.

Strike Commander is in the works. I tried a few months ago and got quite far asset wise but stalled on the flight model, I will probably see how Fable 5.1 does from zero after this weeks limit reset. I imagine it will be able to get quite far.

Strike Commander, a.k.a. the game that required QEMM386 to actually work. I do think it was the last game I got that came with a really nice manual though.

Syndicate!! Actually, this one feels especially appropriate to use an LLM for.

Some old games have high re-playable value. Syndicate is one of them; UFO enemy unknown is another one, as is civilization or Masters of Orion 1. I can reply most of them quite fine. Populous was also quite decent but not quite replayable compared to the others mentioned IMO.

This is amazing. I'm trying to get a handle on how you're doing this, but I can't seem to find anything specific. e.g., is it a case of prompting "Please recreate Populous for the web"?

This post has the actual prompt used for one of my ports and the stack, and there's more info below it under "further reading".

There's really nothing much to it, all the knowledge needed is in the weights of the model, so regardless of what you want to do, you can ask "if I wanted to do this, what would be the best way / best practices to get there with my machine"

https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/what-reverse-engineering...

I use a step-by-step approach:

1. For each topic, write a result Markdown file in `spec/`.

2. Identify the file formats.

3. Reverse Engineer and extract all assets, followed by manual review. This works in 90% of the cases.

4. Determine the compression/packing used for the executable. Most binaries used one of roughly five common executable packers.

5. Unpack the executable manually.

6. Use an ancient free IDA-Pro for disassembly, or a modified DOSBox to determine all code/data blocks and the relevant segment-register values for the 8086 architecture. In the second case I use my vibe-coded disassembler.

7. Identify the major functional domains in the disassembly and split the files accordingly.

...

you are awesome. I'm doing one such port and it's not that simple :)

Red Baron! Wait, how, where, from Amiga? Tell me more please!

https://redbaron.tooclever.org Demo, requires WebGPU - PC version but with modern upgrades (can be disabled), Opus redid the plane models and turned everything proper 3d, plus added ww1 frigates, flak searchlights, etc.

ai slop port is not a port, re-creating the full game engine to run in natively a modern cpu architecture that is the challenge

Using a car is not a way to travel, the real way is to take a horse.

Writing without uppercase letters or full stops is not writing. Low-effort is low-effort. Slop is slop.

wow really nice!!

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