What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI

What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI this.os.isfine.org

Some observations from my War of the Lancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaroftheLance%28videogame%29 1989 Code Harness assisted modernisation WIP I gave Qwen-3....

134 points•keeda•4 days ago•90 comments•

#ai #games #impact #tells #economic #reversing #modernising #modernising old

90 comments

CoolestBeans2 days 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.

visarga2 days 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.

shoo2 days ago

If the main problem is unclear & changing requirements, having 2 different implementations of a system that attempt to implement the vague / changing / missing requirements doesn't seem immediately helpful -- they'll almost certainly disagree, and then you can force one to match the other or so on, and have two implementations of some arbitrary thing.

But none of this "implementing stuff" is making progress to solving the issue of unclear / changing / vague / missing requirements.

halo2 days ago

Agreed - I suspect recompilation and decompilation is an unusually good task for models for many reasons.

applfanboysbgon2 days 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.

georgeecollins2 days 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.

stubish1 day ago

Once you change the artwork and branding, why is there no legal right to sell? Your defense against cloning are trademark, patent, copyright and trade secret. And the lawyers and money to enforce it and the courts to agree. And if the AI does it, rather than you feeding it copyrighted or trademarked assets, then did you violate copyright or trademark law or did the AI company or does this no longer make sense in a post AI world? The article touches on how current AI services launder copyright and trademark in the 'choose one' section.

brookst2 days 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.

Peanuts992 days ago

I built a pen plotter and my biggest challenge was converting and previewing the GCode for plotter images. Recently though I've build a huge toolbox of tools with Codex using spare usage and it's an absolute game changer. Good use of it for sure.

ridiculous_leke2 days ago

Halo running in WASM at 120 FPS over a browser

https://x.com/mitchellhynes/status/2104658015605379094

criemen2 days ago

My kettle (Fellow EKG) has an annoying display bug. With a simple prompt, Astra went and downloaded the firmware, disassembled it, interpreted it and confirmed the bug. It also told me that there's a firmware signature check, so I have unfortunately no way of flashing a fixed firmware myself. I'm not sure I'd be adventurous enough to do that anyways, as I don't know enough about ESP32 microcontrollers to verify what it's doing vs. the chance of bricking my device. Yet,

Agentlien2 days 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.

gmerc2 days ago

Author here: It had no problem creating gameboy and NES ROMs for me https://myroom.isfine.org (order the gameboy from the catalog) was an initial test, I’ve halfway through a demake of dragon strike after stumbling on the fact this was trivial

Agentlien2 days ago

That demo is cute and has a lot of cool stuff in it but I cannot even find a catalogue. Assuming it's what it sounds like this seems like more of the same: porting old games to another emulator - this time via ROMs.

The real challenge with porting is, as I mentioned, porting modern games to constrained hardware. Specifically, porting demanding new PC games to current-gen consoles.

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