Claude Relentlessly Got Nancy Drew (XP, 2007) Running on My M1 (400 Tool Calls)

https://www.joelreske.com/blog/claude-nancy-drew/

by joelres • 5 months ago

9 6 5 months ago

joelres3• 5 months ago

I'm a web engineer with zero Wine experience, and I wanted to replay a Nancy Drew game from 2007 that I used to play on the Windows XP computer in our kitchen. I pointed Claude Code at it and let it run. Six hours, 400 tool calls, a binary DLL patch, a virtual filesystem hack later - it worked! This game is amazing. Also I'm not sure Claude fixed it in a legal way...

aiverson04• 5 months ago

so fun!

bigyabai• 5 months ago

After exhausting every Vulkan approach, it switched back to OpenGL… and it worked. It fell back to an older OpenGL version, but everything rendered.

It sounds like Vulkan was the big blocker here, then? I'd be curious if everything ran fine with nothing but the OpenGL D3DX backend, Proton seems to suggest that the Nancy Drew games are fixed on recent Proton/DXVK builds.

joelres3• 5 months ago

Oh interesting - will give this a look!

Honestly this comment is the exact reason why this is such an interesting allegory - I didn't know Proton existed! And looking at it, it might be perfect for my use case. Appreciate the tip - will take a look!

ticulatedspline• 5 months ago

Very cool! There's a few personal projects like this I'd love to try a SOTA agentic AI like Claude for but I'm terrified to give it any access to my machine.

Stuff like the ISO just reinforces that terror. How did it find the iso? did it do google searches? What if instead of archive.org it found totallySketchWarez.com and installed a virus? what if it found a torrent and set that up and got you in trouble with an ISP?

it's tenacity is also a double edged sword what if it starts to try to modify the OS instead of random DLLs to make things right?

Always seems so risky to let these things loose while at the same time they lose a lot of utility if you have to hold their hand for every web call or decision.

joelres3• 5 months ago

So. True. This use case was fun, but was the first thing I've done that wasn't easily sandboxed.

One key is sandboxing the agent (easy to do with Claude Code) so that it can only see a certain directory and needs to ask permission for additional directory access (works well). Can double layer sandbox if you don't trust the Claude cli.

The ISO issue is whole other ballgame. In this case, for me, it was a bit of a yolo. I did click through the internet archive link and it seemed decent, but definitely risk here. Watching output doesn't really matter if there is a virus in the random executable that it pulled

Claude Relentlessly Got Nancy Drew (XP, 2007) Running on My M1 (400 Tool Calls)

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