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Razengan • today at 12:20 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

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."


Replies

johannes1234321 • today at 1:02 AM

I recently played a little bit with quite naive and simple prompts like "convert this DOS game to run using SDL without dosbox" and in quite a few cases it made a good plan for porting using a custom tailored x86 16bit real mode emulator and then hooking IO on modern foundation and then having it port to some modern language (a few experiments in C++, some Rust) For some games I didn't get to a working state, but for many, especially around transition to VGA, where EGA/CGA had been supported too, they seem to have somewhat isolated and simple graphics for this to work with an okayish amount of tokens.