alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Black Ops II statically recompiled to native ARM64 macOS
I grew up with Black Ops 2 and wanted to see if I could make it work on my 2020 MacBook Pro. So I used Claude Opus 5.5 to create a tool that converts your copy of the game (from Steam) to a native ARM64 Mac app, with almost 60fps in all areas. The whole game is statically recompilated ahead-of-time (AOT) and does not use any emulator whatsoever, be it Wine, Crossover or Rosetta. The best thing is the performance, although some heat issues are still to fix. You get to play the whole Campaign, local Multiplayer (with bots) and local Zombies (all DLCs maps; you need to have them in your Steam library obviously) at about 60fps. Split-screen was not in the PC version, but I've been working on it lately; it's coming soon! LAN mode is on the roadmap for later too :)
Comments
How does it actually recompile, does it use an existing tool? I can’t imagine the agent combs through every routine and hand translates the assembly.
what was your workflow for creating this? there's now extra guardrails around decompiling / reverse engineering, do you think this is still possible to do or were you just lucky enough to do it before the guardrails?
[dead]
The README is very much AI slop. Why don't you people write at least your README as a human? Explain the why? Explain the advantages?
Almost every paragraph makes me want to ask: "so what?"
> There is no Wine and no JIT: the game runs as native code, in one process > the campaign runs at 51–60 frames per second
So what?
Is it a matter of running the game in itself? Was the game not running on Apple M-series in any way, so you're unlocking something that was impossible before?
Or does the game just ran faster (more FPS), load quicker, render better, what?
There's no comparison to how the game runs on x86, or how it runs on M-series with translation layers (IF it runs).
This is an exact manifestation of the AI slop problem. A lot of details. A lot of "how". A lot of "what". So little "why" - you need to read a lot and in the end your questions are never answered, and you don't understand if the project makes sense at all or is just something "we did it because we could".
Stuff like this makes me really happy about AI. The convenience that AAA lacks, or that they intentionally withhold, is now within reach.