Hacker News

Favorites Setup
Comment by KellyCriterion | original | Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
[−]KellyCriterion · 2026-10-09 Fri 19:30 UTC · link
Are todays LLM not capable of translating that stuff into modern JS&Co?
[−]schrijver · 2026-10-09 Fri 20:27 UTC · link
If the LLM can’t run the original code, it can’t compare to verify the translation is accurate
[−]moritzwarhier · 2026-10-09 Fri 21:23 UTC · link
When the runtime is completely different, I'd also argue it's emulation more than translation? Anyway. Lost in translation I guess.
[−]londons_explore · 2026-10-10 Sat 07:03 UTC · link
LLMs are surprising good at looking at plain old hex of a binary and rewriting it as source code that functions similarly.

I'm sure for these older games they'd succeed most of the time.

[−]foxtacles · 2026-10-11 Sun 01:33 UTC · link
For sure. It’s coincidence, but a couple weeks back I had a frontier LLM decode one of those old Director games and port it to run in a web browser. Took about 2 hours. (it did re-use existing OSS libraries): https://github.com/foxtacles/findus3 (this even happens to be part of the game series the author is talking about in the blog post)

I’ve been decompiling and reversing games for over a decade before LLMs came into the picture. The most recent models are incredibly powerful. Basically no reason left to do any manual reversing anymore (if you only care about the end result)