I spent the last few weeks analyzing what Claude did, feeding it my 33 years of memory of how I built the game, my notes and the git repos. It wrote the first draft of the article, and I edited line by line over a week. The screenshots of my 1993 map editor is the first I have run it since then. The one thing I never checked myself is the 108-byte explanation.
Please post any questions. I am also releasing the original game for free.
Think of it as: this is a story that quite possibly would not be told without AI to help with the writeup.
Though I'd admit that using claude for a few hours every day this year desensitivized me to its prose :-)
The amount of non standard hackish and obtuse things that had to be done to implement things in the past feel impossibly complicated to touch today. Lots of people made it up as they went along and used the hardware in ways no one expected. Reminds me of Tim Follin doing the audio for Plock on SNES and Miamoto being shocked the audio was real. It would be so interesting to see what we could learn about development of the past from agentic insights into how code was constructed. I love stuff like this an appreciate the in depth post.
Since Claude did the port and apparently understands it better than you do at this point, can we ask Claude? Is there a git repo we can point Claude at to interrogate it on the way things were done?
hedgehog•3h ago
rabahs•3h ago
sedawkgrep•15m ago
Oh wow...I hadn't even thought of trying something like this. There are soooo many games from that era that I'd love to play again without the hackery of emulation.
ericd•3m ago