This has been an unexpected outcome of agentic coding for me.
I recently ‘rescued’ [0] one of my favourite video game series, No One Live Forever, which is kind of lost to IP hell. It’s been an enjoyable experience, I learnt a lot, and it’s feels great to have revitalised the game.
I'm with you, I wouldn't have expected this a year ago. While it's been awesome for the hacker ethos, I worry that it might be too much too quickly. Commercial software will push to online-only business models to protect their IP from decomplication. For legacy/retro software, this couldn't be better.
One angle I don't see anyone talking about (perhaps because I'm mistaken) is that this is terrible news for Nvidia. AMD also makes great hardware, but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.
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."
There's a lot of activity, but not a lot of it is from people who know what they're doing. Photocraft is less usable now than it was on release, which is impressive. One of the latest releases (I believe 0.11) had a bug where choosing a color on the color palette would hard lock Windows and require a physical restart.
I recently ‘rescued’ [0] one of my favourite video game series, No One Live Forever, which is kind of lost to IP hell. It’s been an enjoyable experience, I learnt a lot, and it’s feels great to have revitalised the game.
0: https://github.com/nolffan
One angle I don't see anyone talking about (perhaps because I'm mistaken) is that this is terrible news for Nvidia. AMD also makes great hardware, but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.
uhm.. My dude, AI can make entire apps from just a couple English sentences, it'll handle cloning an entire online-only app it can see (and sniff)
https://github.com/nolffan/nolfsrc
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."
A new era of ownership is here.
I ported a closed-source game I'm a huge fan of from mac to iOS so I could play it on the go. No plans to release it; just sweet to play how I want.
The limit is your imagination!