s-macke

The BSD Games collection has an ATC Simulator as well from around 1985:

https://github.com/vattam/BSDGames/tree/master/atc

Kennedy Approach was published around the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Approach

Ask a coding agent to decode the assets. Works pretty often for such old games.

What I find fascinating is the fact that you can implement those few lines in an esoteric language such as FRACTRAN or Game of Life and even boot Linux on them. Seems doable now. In theory.

Yes, I’ve tried it. For example, this was my winning entry from a year ago [0]. The LLM only performs trivial obfuscation, not advanced transformations.

For example:

  if (x == 1 || x == 2) { ...

  if (!(2+x*x-3*x)) { ...

[0] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2024/macke/p...

Here is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/live/MoWCwZx1Swc?si=eIOlRsKWNKRVRZeB...

Yes, you haven’t tried it. LLMs are actually awesome at deobfuscation, but terrible at obfuscation. They just can’t do it yet.

They also lack the creativity needed for those entries. Obfuscation is only one part of it. Coming up with the idea is another. Many entries also have special qualities that make them true works of art.

My favorite is the 366-byte C program emulator that can run Linux and Doom [0]. The VM implements an OISC - a One Instruction Set Computer [1].

[0] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/cable/p...

[1] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/cable/R...

This VM implements an OISC - a One Instruction Set Computer.

More information:

https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/cable/R...

Because I haven't found the special case in the disassembly for these "flying" objects. Probably I misinterpret the object coordinate somehow.

Sorry, the maps are rendered in 3D so that you can fly around. I can of course make top-down screenshots of the maps. Thanks for your feedback.

Author here. The Ross’s Game Dungeon video was, to some degree, a motivation for me to start the reverse-engineering process, just for fun. The analysis took place over many years, and I figured out 95% of the format myself. AI helped me then with the coloring, which is pretty complex. I have read the Accursed Farms forum, of course. But it didn't help much.

The map mentioned there can be found as “Unknown Map” in the dropdown. However, I haven’t yet connected that map to the menu screen. It might be called “Tom’s Test Track,” because that string appears in the disassembly.

Integration into noclip might be easy, because I also have the geometry as a standalone .obj file.

I wish I had known this two years ago. I ended up writing my own embedded connection struct to trace these things [0].

  type Connection struct {
    net.Conn
    OnEventCallback func(clientClosed bool, serverClosed bool, err error)
  }

On weekends, yes. During the week, that’s also true if they arrive within a short time frame, e.g., three minutes. Almost no one looks at “New”. That is the real issue.

Author here. Yes, it is integral. I chose this approach to first show how to draw it from back to front, because the code is easier to understand this way.

Nice to see an MCP integration here as well. In my experience, coding agents are great at analyzing MOS6502 code. Because the code is limited to only 64 kB, it does not overwhelm the agent. And in parallel it can write specs and even extract assets via normal coding tools.

Using my similar tool [0], I feel I get roughly a 100x speedup. I will definitely try regenerator2000.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/OpcodeOracle

Exactly. And JSLinux is using one.

Most such emulators have Internet access on the IP level. Therefore, this is a very cheap way to test anything on the Internet.

    apk add nmap
    nmap your.domain.com

It can also be used as a very cheap way to provide a complete build environment on a single website, for example to teach C/C++. Or to learn the shell. You don't have to install anything.

To reverse engineer old C64 games using Coding Agents, I built a CLI and MCP flow disassembly tool. The agent can search the disassembly, provide annotations, manage symbols, and reinterpret code and data.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/OpcodeOracle

AI is very effective for reverse engineering. Unless you’re doing it purely for fun, it makes sense to use AI where it helps.

I’ve tried to visualize the “navigate and modify” process you mentioned in [0]. It’s mesmerizing.

Because reverse engineering outcomes are comparatively easy to verify, it’s a good fit for training for AI. I expect major progress in the next few years, potentially to the point where reverse engineering many binaries becomes highly automated.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/OpcodeOracle

About halfway through my reverse-engineering process, I came across those documents and realized that roughly 50% were missing. I searched pretty much the entire web to see if anyone had stored these files elsewhere, but so far I haven’t had any luck.

Some early source code snippets of the game have even survived and can still be found on archive.org [0]. By today’s standards, they’re almost unreadable.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030906124225/http://www.sonic....

Author here. I’m happy to see one of my projects on Hacker News. This has been a fun one. One evening you just try to disassemble it and wonder where the code is. The following months were a truly satisfying experience, reverse-engineering this diamond.

There is still a functioning Forth interpreter implemented in the game. If they hadn’t removed all the word names, it would have been possible to debug at any time and analyze the program state and call functions live with real Forth code. Some crazy feature at that time.

I am working on an AI multi-agent system to reverse engineer old C64 games and DOS games automatically.

There’s a small misunderstanding here. Reverse engineering by annotating a disassembly file is fine. However, the next obvious steps would be to write a sensible, high-level documentation of the internals of the game and then port it to a high-level language. Indeed, whether this would run on the original hardware might be questionable for such an Atari Game. But have you seen modern C compilers like Oscar64 [0] for such old hardware? Never say never …

[0] https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64

I’ve performed many experiments using AI to reverse-engineer old games like this one, and it looks like the newest generation of models has no trouble with it. They’re actually awesome.

Even with the current models, we might be able to automatically reverse-engineer all those old games, decode all assets, and even rewrite them in a more sensible language than assembler.

I’ve also been playing around with reverse engineering, and I’m very impressed. It turns out that Codex with GPT-5.2 is better at reverse engineering than Claude.

For example, Codex can completely reverse-engineer this 1,300-line example [0] of a so-called C64-SID file within 30 minutes, without any human interaction.

I am working on a multi-agent system that can completely reverse-engineer C64 games. Old MS-DOS games are still too massive to analyze for my budget limit.

[0] https://gist.github.com/s-macke/595982d46d6699b69e1f0e051e7b...

Blast from the past. In my mind, the Adventure Game Studio is forever tied to the ancient (German) Maniac Mansion Mania website [0]. Yes, that Maniac Mansion from Lucasfilm Games.

To this day, they’re are releasing fun new adventure episodes in the Maniac Mansion universe.

[0] https://www.maniac-mansion-mania.com/index.php/en/

... emitting a NYC worth of CO2 in a year is dizzying

Simplified comparisons like these rarely show the full picture [0]. They focus on electricity use only, not on heating, transport, or meat production, and certainly not on the CO2 emissions associated with New York’s airports. As a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate, a flight from Los Angeles to New York with one seat is on the order of 1,000,000 small chat queries CO2e.

Of course we should care about AI’s electricity consumption, especially when we run 100 agents in parallel simply because we can. But it’s important to keep it in perspective.

[0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

Thanks. I have submitted my platformer "Interplanetary Postal Service" [0]. This is a lunar lander type game with real computational fluid dynamics.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/Interplanetary-Postal-Service