alt Hacker NewsThis has been an unexpected outcome of agentic coding for me.
I recently ‘rescued’ [0] one of my favourite video game series, No One Live Forever, which is kind of lost to IP hell. It’s been an enjoyable experience, I learnt a lot, and it’s feels great to have revitalised the game.
Replies
I've always meant to play this, had actually asked GPT about doing a decomp jsut the other day, and it surfaced yours. Nicely done
AI can also fix OS compatibility issues for older games:
I had Aviary Attorney lying around (great game btw, even if you don't like Phoenix Wright) but it wouldn't run on newer macOS versions. I tried asking Astra on a whim, looked away, and within a few minutes it was on screen!
Turns out "The game used 32-bit Node-WebKit, an old combination of Node.js and Chromium that modern macOS cannot run. Its actual game content was HTML, JavaScript, images, and audio, so replacing the runtime was feasible."
I'm with you, I wouldn't have expected this a year ago. While it's been awesome for the hacker ethos, I worry that it might be too much too quickly. Commercial software will push to online-only business models to protect their IP from decomplication. For legacy/retro software, this couldn't be better.
One angle I don't see anyone talking about (perhaps because I'm mistaken) is that this is terrible news for Nvidia. AMD also makes great hardware, but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.