alt Hacker NewsI'm very happy to see this! Not so much because of TDIII (which I played, although not nearly as much as Stunts), but because there seems to be some momentum building around recreating old games using AI agents, and I love that! I had explored some related ideas [0] but throwing Claude at the problem seems super promising. The recent Crimsonland thing [1] was great!
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>But what if we could run the original binary game code unmodified, just with better art?
There's an entire category of rom hacks devoted to this - replacing just the sprite data.
You should also take a look at 3dSen. It’s an emulator that works with original NES ROMs but transforms the graphics into 3D voxels.
This is an interesting area. I've felt that with AI, it would be nice to have a project that I work on "by hand" so that my general skills don't atrophy and I've been writing an implementation of the Kyra engine used by old DOS games like Eye of the Beholder. It's mostly well documented and there are full fledged implementations (like with ScummVM) so this is just exercise for me.
I wrote a decoder for the CPS file format they use for sprites and it worked file for all images except one. It rendered half the image properly and then scrambled the rest. I could see that the sprite information was there but there was some offset problem. I had claude dig into it in detail along and gave it the ScummVM source for reference. I also gave it Ghidra so that it could debug the actual EOB.EXE file but nothing we tried got it to render properly. Even SSI's own code which got from a modding wiki failed to render this image. My final conclusion was that it was a half done asset that somehow found its way into the asset archive and is never used in the game but that's a flaky conclusion given that its name is referenced in the EXE.
I've been having a lot of fun upscaling the sprites used for the cutscenes and remixing the music using AI. It's a game I played a lot as a kid so being able to tinker with it at a low level is a nice distraction.
It's purely a "fun" side project without deadlines or anything so I get to do what I want with it without any hassles about "being productive".
And a laser puzzle game Chromatron, https://quesma.com/blog/chromatron-recompiled/.
But it gets even wilder, as now creating a Game Boy Advance emulator became a benchmark, https://gbaeval.com/.
I played a lot of Stunts in the 1990s. I only learned in the 2010s that you could actually edit the terrain, too.
Me and some friends spent so much time playing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Island
Your blog entry:
https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html
is wild!
I love the idea. I used Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 to get back to compile an old DOS game I wrote back around 1991 and for which I had lost the tooling (compiler / linker / notes / build files). It was on my todo list since years, decades even, but I never got to it. With a LLM it was easy: I didn't let the LLM do everything, I used it to find what needed fixing (like two macros I had used with names that were now clashing with "modern" compilers methods names etc.).
> I hacked together the art using my terrible Gimp skills and some Public Domain and Creative Commons assets from OpenGameArt
IMO AI models are better at generating pictures than at writing code, in that pictures do tolerate sloppy approximations. While code doesn't tolerate slop that much.
Why not use AI for the assets?
Stunts was the greatest! You could make your own tracks, save replays and (IIRC) even resume gameplay from any point in the replay. My very favorite game of all time.