Reverse Engineering SimTower

First of all, super cool. I have a soft spot for SimTower as well. :)

> I didn’t want to do a function-by-function port. First, APIs may be copyrightable - and copying a binary that closely might implicate copyright more than an approach closer to clean-room design. But it was clear that I needed some level of feedback from the ground-truth binary in order to provide a hill for the LLM to climb on the reimplementation.

Interesting, but isn't this what, say, the Ocarina of Time reverse engineer port does[1]? I imagine the fact that this hasn't been served a takedown notice from Nintendo is a proof that it's defensible? Or at least that there's precedent, ha.

Anyway, this is really cool. I genuinely think the only thing that's missing for me to waste an afternoon here is the sound effects!

[1]: https://github.com/zeldaret/oot

I remember that SimTower (Windows 3.1 version) would briefly draw the dialog boxes in Japanese, then immediately redraw it in English. This was on a computer without any Japanese fonts.

I sunk ages into "the world's most brutal elevator simulator" - how does the game model elevator demand? I always wondered if it was some sort of Poisson distribution.

I played when I was a kid. I figured out you could just build condos like crazy and make money pause build more, and repeat, get tons of money, build all the way up. But I couldn't figure out how to get people to the top level for that achievement.

I'm gonna Google that and see what I got wrong

> First, the AI makes premature conclusions about subsystems, records them, and then struggles to figure out when to abandon its earlier guesses.

This perfectly describes what feels off to me about Opus 4.7 (unsure if that’s what you are using). It seems to go down an incorrect path, I correct it, but it still references things from it. Trying to direct it back becomes a mess.

Has anyone experience this as well or am I going crazy? Doesn’t happen with 4.6 for me.