(github.com)
I wonder if we’ll get to a situation where a new game is reversed in the first few months by a team effort. Right now it’s mostly solo devs, but a technical team that’s capable without LLMs is unstoppable with them, and given the nature of modding communities, the only thing they are missing is an LLM to grind away at the details of the game that would otherwise take years to find out.
> Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes
Neither the HN submission or GitHub repository says it's first or novel though? Just that it's (another) port of it?
The actually important work (of making the original code release portable and then create Linux and macOS ports) had already been done in https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX. There is really not much to see here.
It's so crazy to remember sitting in front of W3Schools after school trying to learn PHP to create a website, and hear people today saying it isn't very impressive a fucking machine can automatically translate/port code from one platform to another, even a machine doing that with PHP3 > PHP4 code back then would have been cool but nope, "not at all impressive" just because things improved so much, so quickly, everyone got quickly used to the status quo.
I agree with you in general though, the title does make it sound like more was done than what was done in actuality, as it was just a iOS port. Still, I'd wager it seems interesting enough, given it's on the front page right now.
It's a good example of AI psychosis I guess, people reading things into a headline which they want to be true, no matter what reality says ;)
When you look at the commit history, the actual changes come down to a few dozen lines of code, all of them absolutely trivial, and most of those code changes seem to be cherry-picked bugfixes from the original project.
More like "wisdom of the crowds" (for better or worse) unless you're trying to argue that everyone who upvotes/downvotes on HN suffers from AI psychosis ;)
You can’t downvote articles, so a relatively small amount of enthusiastic people slamming upvote will do it.
Have you ported a desktop title to mobile? It is NOT trivial. This is the next step in a continuing chain of work that builds upon the next and next person's work, but this is not a trivial step. If it was so trivial, why hadn't it already been done?
The jump to Apple Silicon is net-new work, and they aren't trying to pretend they did more than they did.
> This fork — the iOS/iPadOS port (arm64-ios cross-build, DXVK-on-iOS, touch controls, app lifecycle, packaging) and engine fixes, offered upstream
They are even asking you to support the original creators on Steam, so they are getting a cut. No one is stealing assets. I would love to see more of this sort of work being done out in the wild, not discouraging it. Were previous steps harder? Absolutely. Doesn't that invalidate this step? No.
1983 will seem like nothing by comparison.
My custom IDA CLI is just a simple thing on top of IDA Python's integration + ida-domain + some higher-level helpers, and works as a daemon with workers, so a stale/bad request doesn't corrupt an IDA DB (an issue I had when I was using idasql).
A bit offtopic, but: do you have any links to your efforts? I'm curious to see what other people do in this area.
Then recently I found https://github.com/bkerler/ida_rpc which seems to be ~60% the same thing as the one I have, the only big difference is that I do not give any special commands to LLMs, they just have to write Python in scripts/inline heredocs to interact with IDA. This lets them do a lot more interesting things since they get a full programming language.
This is an example of how LLMs work with idagent (`ida` is implicitly imported, ida.types, ida.comments is helper's own wrappers): https://paste.debian.net/hidden/cf46a122
More interesting example that was used to let the LLM/me track the rename progress for the initial function renames + gaps (code-looking like bytes that weren't inside of functions, IDA's autoanalysis missed some real functions). Although the game turned out to be small enough with only ~1500 real game functions that needed renames, which was done in ~10 hours of agent time total I think (I didn't parallelize with multiple agents). https://paste.debian.net/hidden/bf458b3a
To be honest, you can probably have an agent vibecode a similar MVP tool to the one I have in about an hour-two :)
I had no idea how to do any of this. I let GPT-5.5 download Ghidra + MCP connectors, start the project, and do all the work. I gave it my vision and gave it iterative user testing feedback.
Now I have a MUCH more playable UX.
O: https://store.steampowered.com/app/328440/Deadlock_Planetary...
I've spent almost 30 years building applications for the web. I've been switching my attention to different models of distribution in part because I see a desire for people to not be paying monthly seat subscriptions, but also because it can simplify my own operations - I want to move to a solo indie dev model, and giving you an executable you run means you look after "operations", and I don't. Desktop applications in particular have the potential for you to integrate them with your agent workflows.
But if I put effort into building some secret sauce into an application, and there is then a risk that by distributing it, it gets reverse engineered and then rebuilt by competitors, malicious actors, whoever, there is now the same economic risk to software distribution as there is to DRM-free media distribution. As a result, I might just not do it.
Now, some people will argue software wants to be free - build on the F/LOSS economic model, this becomes less of an issue - but there isn't really a viable F/LOSS economic model for most developers.
Per seat monthly subscriptions with remote access seems like the way we need to be, then...
That said, I also think that public reviews will start getting recalibrated by the users themselves. People will start noticing that programs are unreliable or lack features which are seemingly simple to implement with an LLM. The quality of an app may very well depend on how hard it is to replicate, otherwise, why not ship your own?
If you already have engineers on staff, a few tens (or even hundreds) of dollars per month per plugin is likely a rounding error budget-wise. If you don't have your own engineers, you're probably not going to be able to produce something as good (reliable, well thought out, etc) as a commercial offering.
I had the same gut reaction as you, but the reality is much more subtle. We work with several clients who are bought into at least one of these ecosystems, and there's no way the math ever works out in favor of building an in-house solution.
It works great just like that.
Curious - why like this? I usually tell it to write down the analysis once all is clear, so I'm wondering if your approach is better.
These notes files do end up being more of a “how we got here” messy journal and less of a real report but they’re full of useful breadcrumbs that make it quick to pick things back up in a fresh context. Having it write a summary report on a topic based on the raw notes works out pretty good.
Another useful thing with these (not RE) is that sometimes I end up starting to debug a problem and I (or Claude) realize that it might be related to a different problem and being able to then cross-reference between the two raw notes files while pulling that thread seems to work well.
Whether or not it’s the “right” approach, I overall tend to treat sessions/context as ephemeral and need some kind of more solid WIP artifact. I do work in an industry that tends to trigger safeguards (unmanned/autonomous agricultural aviation) as well, and have occasionally gotten Claude to a point where I can’t get a session to continue but Codex will pick it up and finish.
Of course then you have Starfield which is so unimaginable uninspiring that nothing can really be done to save it..
My gaming preference is to go to an area as per game design, so the fact that I would be outmatched does not bother me and would prefer it that way. I do, however, understand why the game designers chose level scaling for what they wanted to achieve.
You can still work around this without resorting to level scaling. You can give players an exploration option that avoids fighting, but sacrifices something else (ie., you can explore as a ghost, but can't take any loot with you). You can give low-level players some kind of newbie buff that will keep them alive (but won't allow them to win). You could make the perception of the world level dependent. You could also just scale locations or regions once, so that if a player reaches it at a low level, it'll become easier, and if you get there at a high level, it'll become the de facto endgame area. You could also just not implement leveling at all: The Bard's Tale (remake) was a bit like this.
Leveling up is not fun if it doesn't have an impact on how your character interacts with the world. If you're going to use level scaling to make leveling a no-op, it's often better to just go the action-adventure route and not pretend the game is an RPG. Seriously: what's the point of pumping my Strength stat if Villager A always has enough vitality to offset any gains on my part? It's especially grating if it's the same village and the same villager, revisited 40 hours later, and it still takes 3/4 of your health in a hit.
I don't think naive level scaling (Oblivion/Skyrim-style) is the right solution for "let the player go anywhere they want from the start". It's certainly a solution, but not a good one. A more nuanced mix of story justification, natural movement limitations (distance, special skills needed to get somewhere), level/area design (make areas with harder enemies less likely to be visited first), some non-combat exploration options, etc. all seem like a better way of letting the player experience open-world freedom without taking away the RPG progression "from zero to hero" from them.
I played a lot of Might and Magic VII back in the day (a few years before Morrowind IIRC). It was a huge world and you could go anywhere after getting off the tutorial island. Some endgame areas were gated behind lengthy quests, some areas were inaccessible without reaching them "the hard way" for the first time, others were impossible to reach without special skills or items, and there were skills/spells (invisibility, fly) that allowed safe passage through high-level areas if needed. Taken as a whole, it gave you a lot of options in terms of where to go at any given time, protected you to some extent from getting insta-killed because you made a wrong turn, but didn't make exploration trivial or level progression pointless. When you give players freedom, you should also allow them to commit suicide by charging at a horde of dragons while underleveled and underprepared. Trying to make the whole world immediately accessible is the kind of handholding that is actually limiting in the long run, and takes away an important part of the RPG experience. I don't think there are many CRPGs outside of TES that use level scaling - personally, I only experienced one in Wizardry 8, and it was way less absurd than Oblivion (areas had level ranges - you won't get an endgame area mob to be level 1 if you happen to reach it at that level yourself, and Villager A in starting area won't ever get to level 20 if you revisit it later).
So, between some limited/partial scaling and all the other design choices you could make, using Oblivion-like level scaling to "make the world accessible" is just bad, lazy design to me.
Then there's the "level up by doing" mechanic, which is a mixed bag. It can be done well, but in Oblivion, it only resulted in putting a book on the spacebar. Voila, my character literally jumps around and looks utterly idiotic, but Acrobatics levels rise.
Being unable to just go fight a dragon at level 1, and then progressing to routinely curbstomping dragons (Baldur's Gate 2 - solo Sorcerer run is my favorite example: "I see, you're resistant to magic. Let me introduce you to the Magic Sequencer with Lower Resistance x4. Time stop. Horrid wilting. Wish rest. Oh, I didn't need to, you're dead already.") by the end. It's not the only selling point of RPGs, and it can sometimes be omitted entirely (e.g., Disco Elysium). But if there is a classic leveling system, I expect it to work, from zero to hero. It's not as fun if the numbers going up don't translate into real changes in how your character interacts with the world.
I suspect it won't stop people, and that it won't be much of an issue in a lot of cases. I wouldn't want to be the one to test it in any sort of court though. Not even on the other side of things, where it'll become even more of a nightmare to protect your indie IP on any form of platform which doesn't heavily regulate things.
The code is also copyrighted and owning a license for a game does not make you safe from being sued for pirating that game or its code. It's fine in this case only because the engine was open sourced.
Nothing makes you safe from getting sued.
See also: [1]. You could also reverse engineer in a solid jurisdiction.
I ran C&C Generals in Wine on Linux back in the days. More stable than Windows XP.
(as always, IANAL)
Interoperability falls under what gets filtered out in the filtration step of the test.
The stakes are low, it’s mostly for fun and you can iterate on it. Compare this with Bun which was just like, “hey we converted everything to Bun to Rust from Zig, of course it works, what could possibly go wrong, I’ll totally write up a blogpost (that still doesn’t exist) explaining what we did, you can put this into your production environment soon!”
Blogposts were promised, details were hinted, but no, it’s just full steam ahead because the AI worked so well. The converted unit tests all worked, all the synthetic tests are okay, so what are you complaining about?
At some point, it’s less about the technical questions and more about getting that pesky human buy-in.
"Yes, the AI rewrote the code. No, we do not pretend that we've scrutinized the code, or that we understand it. It works, tests pass, so we don't care, and so shouldn't you."
The "recklessness" is offered as the new normal. Because it kinda, well, works for them.
Also they're probably interested in the team just as an acqui-hire of good developers, and they're probably interested in the marketing value of converting the actual bun to rust via LLMs. But mostly I'd assume it was about needing the team to effectively direct the LLMs.
The problem is: quickly fixing problems (or preventing problems) benefits from having a good understanding of what the code is doing.
If you do have a suite of automated checks that's comprehensive enough that if it passes, no one will have any problems with the result, I think I'd agree. -- I don't think we're quite there at the point where "programming" is coming up with that suite of automated checks and then just not regarding the source code of the program itself.
- I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build
- Claude Code is not a particularly complicated piece of software from an engineering perspective (nor it's particularly well-engineered, at least at the moment).
So in my book "it runs Claude Code" would be pretty weak evidence that the rewrite is going to be successful (the tests they've done are much better evidence, but that's a topic for another time).
No, I'm pretty sure it is, actually, since June 17:
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181
>> Upgraded the bundled Bun runtime to 1.4
Now, Bun 1.4 doesn't seem to officially exist on https://bun.com/blog or https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases, so I can't be 100% sure this is the Rust version. However, I have to do some patching of the Claude Code binary to get it to run on my OS, and version 2.1.181 coincided with some changes that make suspect it's using Rust now.
https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewri...
> 13,044 unsafe blocks in the resulting Rust code (hand-written Rust projects of similar size average ~73)
Grok is this true?
I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny.
Hang on. A claim like that can be verified with a single grep! Give me a minute...
$ rg -U "unsafe\s+\{" . | wc -l
10551
If I understand what happened here correctly this isn't really a case of any such meme, but the result of the porters (heh) telling the LLM to directly convert zig code using unsafe to match the previous code "exactly".
I.e. more like using the LLM as a fancy version of c2rust [1] (which would result in just as much unsafe) than a result of LLMs reaching for escape hatches too liberally.
The high number of unsafe blocks is a good sign.
I've never understood why people make fun of Rust code that has lots of unsafe blocks. Obviously, the goal is to reduce those blocks, but consider also the number of safe blocks!
Last I heard Claude Code devs were trying to compare their app to a game engine or rendering system.
This was summarily ridiculed. Are you saying that writing a game engine is easier than writing Claude Code?
Huh... it looks to me like bun has yet to cut a release post Zig->Rust port (the latest one on github is still on a branch that says it's written in zig in the readme). I assume that nothing is using the rust version yet...
Which also cuts against the complaints about "of course it works [...] you can put this into your production environment soon!" since they don't seem to be asserting either of those things.
When someone on another social media platform commented expressed some concern, his response was to ask him what the explicit bug he was talking about was and that he would generate a fix. That sound you hear is the woosh as the point flies by. And in general, this just feels like a consistent problem with Bun.
The problem is what comes next. They now have code that they don't understand, and they are likely to work on it with AI in the future, but the new features they may introduce later will not have the luxury of hand-written tests and a reference code. So, unless they undertake the massive effort needed to fully understand the Rust code and deal with all these "unsafe", quality is very likely to go down, Microslop style.
Seems doubtful, I'd put money on it being something like Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. Maybe CC could claim the (odious) title of most actively used vibe-coded development app, though.
I... somehow did not know that.
What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.
This is quite the understatement. Actually, it's probably the understatement of the year.
"Pretty good, not bad, great use case".
Dude. Fable fucking did what?
This is another "AI-ism" I noticed, mostly in coding agents - they seem to be very fond of making up new "compound nouns" (and occasionally verbs) to sum up relatively complex and specific concepts into single noun phrases. I wasn't sure if it's to save tokens or if the AI uses this to get a concise "identifier" for a concept that it can refer back to later, but I found it very noticeable.
I find the resulting sentences hard to read, though it does get better if you're aware of that tendency and make a conscious effort to parse the noun phrases. But I guess since it's just intermediate output from coding agents and not text for essays or blog posts, it's fine.
It's a thing in some Germanic languages. Instinct is to merge nouns into word, e.g. 'lawnchair', but that gives you a red squiggly line, but 'lawn chair' also looks wrong, so 'lawn-chair' is the middle ground.
English word origins are a fascinating rabbit hole.
My favourite example of which is Northern Ireland's Orange Order.
The colour is orange, because that was the Royal colour of the family of the monarch it was named after, William of Orange, who was Dutch, titled after the principality of Orange which is named after the city of Orange which is French which got its name from the Celtic word for forehead or temple.
The colour is named after the fruit, the fruit's name is a corruption "a norange" -> "an orange", which goes back to naranja which goes to Arabic which goes to Classical Persian which goes to Sanskrit.
Meanwhile, the dutch word for the fruit is sinaasappel, Chinese apple, compare with the English word "mandarin" used for many different Chinese things.
I don’t think it’s easy on native speakers when it happens, but it’s even harder when you’re not.
--- AGENTS.md ---
## Plain words, not jargon
Don't use jargon-as-shorthand. Say what you actually mean.
- Don't say "load-bearing assumptions". Say "the assumptions the xyz depends on".
- Don't say "cross-service". Name both services, e.g. "whether the X service can derive duration without calling the Y service". "Cross-X" is confusing because it hides which things are involved.
- Don't deliver verdicts as abstract noun-phrases like "Cross-RCA double-counting is unfounded". Say it plainly: "I checked whether the same root cause gets counted twice across RCA runs, and it doesn't."
## No earth-shattering declarations
Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything", "now I have the full picture", "this changes the game", etc. Just state what you found plainly. Most findings are ordinary; report them that way.
## Don't reflexively hedge a "yes"
When the answer is yes, say yes. Don't soften every positive answer with a caveat: it erodes confidence in the "yes". Only add a caveat when there's a genuine, specific uncertainty worth flagging.
On another note, I find AI instructions like this (e.g. "Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything",...") more harm than good in my own uses. It changes behavior in subtle ways that makes it less predictable to me. I'd rather it has its own AI-isms and quirks, that I've fully gotten used to, and I know what to expect. I know when it says certain things, in certain ways, that's what I think it means. Quirks and AI-isms don't annoy me, I get used to how it states things.
> "now I have the full picture"
I always interpreted that phrase as a sort of marker to delimit the phase in which it explores the codebase and gathers information from the phase in which it implements the changes.
Not sure if it's still done, but I think some months ago there was discussion that some of the phrases are injected by the inference loop to "steer" the model - e.g. "But wait" if a thought block was too short etc. Obviously such phrases couldn't be influenced by the prompt.
Anyway: in my case Opus absolutely did not follow a similar instruction in the CLAUDE.md file. (But then again: it hardly followed _any_ CLAUDE.md instruction properly)
And if you manage to do this automatically before committing, you’ve built the backpressure everybody is talking about.
And probably that should be run in different harness or with custom system prompt? Since they introduce quirks and glitches as well.
(somehow this motivated me to resurrect HN account)
I often tell codex to launch a subagent without prior context to „remove BS phrases and make the prose sound more natural and higher readability“. That‘s usually enough to get better results.
No, it’s good. When they stop doing this, it’ll be harder spot the machine slop.
"The evening settled over the city, drawing the light out of the streets one corner at a time. Windows blinked awake with lamplight, and the wind moved through the alleys restlessly, leaves brushing against walls before gathering themselves along the pavement. In the distance, the river kept its steady argument with the stone embankments. When the night pressed in, the weather became increasingly angry, until it was a raging storm."
But such personification is a natural part of how the English speak.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190825132048/https://patriciae...
See also "wind moved restlessly", "weather became angry". And raging storm? I mean come on... I won't even put that last one in quotes.
And like a sibling reply pointed out, personificiation is not the same as anthropomophism. Nor is plagiarized personification. It has no inner thoughts, and no fondness of anything. It's nothing but a cheap, superficial facsimile of human writing and nothing more. Great for form filling and boilerplate though. Not so great for anything else.
still cool but the title makes it sound like it was done from scratch
EA Games open sourced the original C&C Generals source code a year ago.
GeneralsX is a fork of the original source code. The fork changes the code to be easier to be ported to other platforms, which GeneralsX provides native Linux and macOS builds.
This project adds a iOS target for the GeneralsX project, the iOS port was made using Claude Fable.
It is cool that a LLM was able to create a iOS port? Yes, but saying like if it was something that was hard or that it would take too much time to do before LLMs is a bit disingenuous in my opinion, especially because the GeneralsX had already done the bulk of the effort of making the code portable in the first place, and that there was already a macOS port.
For reference, the iOS port only needed to add 2,179 lines of code on files that already existed on GeneralsX, and that's not excluding comments, which Claude loves to add some LARGE comments, and things that are iOS app specific, like the app's Info.plist.
still very cool, and sci fi not long ago
But it didn't, thats the whole point. The game in question was updated like a day ago, not 20 years.
Fable added few config files for iOS and a gesture mapping to mouse events. It did not do any of the hard stuff.
The title is so misleading that it is probably the single reason why this made to the front page with people assuming it actually did anything hard here.
If anyone deserves the recognition - its the upstream projects that made the game modern and cross platform in the first place.
> rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal.
Ok, *this* is a bit weird. Why create such a jenga tower of indirections instead of directly letting the LLM port the rendering code from D3D8 to Metal either through a D3D8-to-Metal shim or even better by creating a new Metal-based render layer beneath the higher level game specific rendering code? I would expect that the LLM can 'see through' all those redundant shims and collapse them into the equivalent Metal code.
Also the readme says 'no emulation', but then goes on to describe the rendering layer as emulating D3D8 on top of Vulkan on top of Metal ;)
(also why are both Meson and CMake required)
PS: after reading more, it can be explained by what this project does (and it's not what the HN title says): it's not a port from the original C&C Generals code release to macOS/iOS, instead all the heavy lifting (of making the original code base portable, and providing example ports to Linux and macOS) was all already done by an existing project (https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX), all that this project did was slightly enhance the existing macOS version so that it also runs on iOS.
Suddenly this is much less impressive and could probably have been done just as well with older and simpler models (or tbh, a few hours or at most a few evenings of manual coding - macOS and iOS code is nearly identical for this type of application).
> Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes)
It’s cool that someone took the extra steps to run it on iPad and iOS, but if the README is correct then it was already ported to macOS? Going from Mac to iPad isn’t trivial, but it’s a much smaller jump than porting into the Apple world the first time.
You can sidestep flags by just compacting and then changing the model back at any rate.
> "ERROR! Failed to install app '2732960' (No subscription)"
This is of course mentioned in the read me.
So if you're just gonna do a clickbait project...why pump the competition?
Am I reading that right? It makes API calls that go through 5 different layers before actually getting rendered? That's kind of crazy. I'm surprised it works, although I guess the underlying libraries are solid enough that it shouldn't be unexpected.
This was the pipeline in Proton for macOS (I'm not sure if it's still is the case, been quite a while since I checked).
There're some D3D implementations over Metal that could skip the Vulkan layer but none implement the old D3D8 so you'd still need another layer that implements e.g. D3D8 over D3D9-11. Also, DXVK and MoltenVK have got a lot of traction and fixes on their own, so they're probably the most accurate pipeline for D3D on Metal.
It's not the "clean room" approach and companies could still claim it violates some kind of copyright and get it taken down.
Theoretically you could clean room by having different agents/models/context windows to do both decompilation and reimplementation. This is untested in court afaik and I don't think anyone wants to spend money to find out.
There was a non-clean room reimplementation of gta3 a few years ago. The gta publisher DMCAd and of course the fans who did it didn't have any money to fight in court (and probably couldn't find anyone who would take a big complicated case on such bad facts pro bono). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/02/take-two-interactive-h...
This started back in February and looking at commits, Fable did only a small part of the latest commits. 19 commits out of 2000:
https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/commits...
And maybe it wasn't even Fable, they might have downgraded to Opus.
This is the kind of frequent misinformation that makes me skeptical of Anthropic LLM claims. Whenever I compare them to GPT 5.5 on my web dev workflows, they seem to trade blows, even Fable, which I started testing since it was re-enabled.
Also I bet any decent LLM could have done such port. Think GLM 5.2 or similar which would probably work better because it doesn't constantly try to guess if I'm a terrorist trying to hack goverments or develop some biological weapon.
People just don't have the resources to compare LLMs and imply whatever they used is the best thing ever and unlocked some new workflow.
I have seen little improvement since Opus 4.6.
A great use for what AI can help with, especially in the hands of dedicated fans. Maybe I will find some time to try and experiment with custom maps or units, the modding scene of C&C Generals was always pretty lively.
This means you can play for maybe 10 minutes on the happy path but just as you are getting into the zone either a CTD or some strange event would make the game/simulation unplayable.
And while debugging is made easier, it's much more effort than telling the model to convert the code. Hence it's usually not done in these demos.
Most of these low-hanging bugs would have been caught upstream by now.
Then, you first need some tooling, either Ghidra (open-source) or IDA (paid), and some tooling to expose them to an LLM. I have a custom IDA Python-based CLI that lets LLMs trivially call into IDA's Python APIs from CLI, but there are tens of different Ghidra/IDA MCP/CLI/SQL projects out there.
After that, it becomes more mechanical, you just let the agent (or multiple agents) explore and start renaming (easier to start with functions + globals), better if it's something that's directly applied to the suite you're using, so that all names show up everywhere. This is actually quite a quick process, especially for older/smaller games. After you have enough function names, you need to instruct and have LLMs add actual types, so that the decompile doesn't have raw casts and offsets, but real fields + types. They will also need to apply types to globals and functions.
Afterwards comes the hardest part - you can export this very well named/annotated decompile, and do one of:
1) Have the LLM try to directly polish the code enough to be compilable. Despite of the decompile quality, this isn't as hard as it sounds.
2) Have the LLM recreate the project from scratch in another language, something like https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/. This can be easier to get initial results, but you're sure to hit tons of bugs due to the differences in implementations.
The 1st approach is more thorough, especially because you can find a matching C/C++ compiler and start doing actual decomp.dev-like work - binary matching functions so your source code compiles down to the exact bytes as in the original binary. This is the longest, hardest part, human community projects take years to complete, and LLMs still struggle with getting matches for 100%, so you might spend weeks-months, and tons of LLM usage - an agent can take like an hour to match a single 1000-byte function in worst case.
As a small note - you do not need to binary match 100% to have the game be absolutely playable. Compilers are often very tricky to lead, so you might already have the code that does exactly the same thing, but just a different local variable layout might make the compiler use different registers.
So if that is released to the public, it's in the public domain, no license is applicable.
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert
This seems to be the most active port saying it works on a Mac/Linux https://github.com/Daft-Freak/CnC_and_Red_Alert
Life was different back then. Source control systems were a LOT worse (this is CVS era for open source development). We certainly weren't in the current era where everyone wants to play these old games on their phones now.
What almost certainly happened is all copies of the source were simply lost. They may have sat on someone's hard drive, a team server hard drive, or somewhere else. It's possible they didn't have more than a few copies while development was ongoing.
cnc-ddraw i think would get it to run fine on a steam deck though, so you should be able to play it without much issue
Damn, I still have the CD in one of my unopened boxes from our last move.
the result: http://jhedin.github.io/merlin-s-revenge/
reasonably it works quite close to the lingo, but this is way difficult, and not just from being rusty. steve had most things triggered on the animation frame, which opus hasnt quite figured out by looking at the code and pulling stuff out of the .dir
i do remember that playing at double scale was a lot harder in general, but theres a really clear cooldown missing between attackes
One big caveat with iPad and mobile, though, is battery usage. I strongly suspect that power consumption is the reason that a number of games made it to Mac, but not iPad.
> The naive plan (port EA's raw source) is a multi-month job. The actual job was "port the best community fork," which was a one-session job.
https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/blob/ma...
Still, it represents a possible way how AI gets rid of team members.
Fable contributed 19 commits; that's well within a solo effort.
Another great case study in why native Vulkan drivers would be a boon for Apple's mobile computing. That's quite the render pipeline...
Every time I try to vibe code myself to sleep I blink once and it's 5am. Creating is too much fun.
Any tips?
> Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes)
Fable added 19 commits on top of the parent fork, which did not use AI.
You can see the diff of what Fable added here: https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/compare...
Wait. It's a port from a game from 2003. I don't think PC had 4 GB of memory back then (unless my memory is fuzzy, ah!): I mean, maybe some had that, but not the majority. I doubt the requirements for the original C&C Generals were 4 GB of memory.
OK, I just checked on a box of C&C Generals on eBay: requirement 128 MB of RAM (I know I could have asked a LLM, but checking a picture of an actual box is kinda fun).
I understand the need for a bit more graphics etc. but that's still a big jump: if the reqs were 128 MB or RAM for the PC, the game wasn't using that.
So we're talking something like a 32x inflation in RAM usage during the port (unless I didn't understand the caveat).
Why can't a game requiring 128 MB in 2003 run on machine 20 years more recent without using all the RAM?
Is there a plausible reason or are we to consider that when porting using Fable, we can expect the RAM usage of a program to go up by 32x?
EDIT: the original game has more asset than I would have guessed, skimming through the port's docs I found this:
> the game requires .big archive files (INIZH.big, MapsZH.big, etc.) totaling 4-5 GB. These files cannot be committed to repository due to copyright (EA Games property).
4 / 5 GB is not nothing. I wonder if the memory issue could be related to the way these are loaded?
Seems like an impossible ask to verify if you don't have an immense test suite that covers everything.
What works (all verified on a real iPad and iPhone):
Campaign, Skirmish, and Generals Challenge: full missions, objectives, cutscenes, saves All audio: music, unit voices, EVA announcements, Challenge taunts, briefing FMVs Touch controls built for RTS: tap select, drag a selection box, long-press deselect, two-finger camera pan, pinch zoom Self-contained install: game data ships inside the app bundle It's the real engine: unmodified game logic compiled for ARM64, rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal. Not emulation, not streaming.
No game assets are included or distributed. You need your own copy (Steam sells Zero Hour) and a script pulls the data from your own account. Code is GPL v3.
Repo, with a full engineering log of every bug and fix (the black-minimap one is a 2003 texture-format fallback that ate the alpha channel; worth a read if you like archaeology): https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/blob/ma...
Building: macOS is about four commands; iPhone/iPad needs Xcode and a free Apple developer account since you sideload your own build. Known issues (long-session memory on iPad, a rare backgrounding crash) are documented in the README.
Credit: fbraz3/GeneralsX did the heavy macOS/Linux lifting, TheSuperHackers keep the community codebase alive, and EA did a genuinely good thing releasing the source. The engine fixes I found are heading upstream so every platform benefits.
(And of course, not affiliated with or endorsed by EA, and sorry China had to deal with all of those particle cannons in that demo video)
I found the bundle scripts already prefer VULKAN_SDK/VULKAN_SDK_ROOT, but the build script only scans ~/VulkanSDK
Good job. It was inevitable, but still someone had to, please excuse me, say the words.
Pylint is different because it’s working against a necessarily dynamic wavefront that it has to keep parity with as it advances. All python changes, ecosystem adaptations, etc - and maintaining that with an AI harness in CI would never work. It would require a concerted effort and thought along the way.
So it’s sort of a different beast all together. In fact I think this is a great demonstration of using AI to resurrect technology built for X to work with Y, where X is dead and Y is current. Automating this feels like a net positive and because the original software is “finished” there isn’t decision making and strategy required.
"Who will maintain this?" appears to be "Me with an agent". And it's great.