I recently threw an llm at porting an old title I had published more than 25 years ago. 150 loc in a very modular codebase. It's not easy. I got rendering and a few modules working within a week. There's a reason why the heavy lifting for this C&C port had already been done by humans.
Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
241–250 of 302 posts
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#242I think the next 10 years or so are going to see a chucklefuck of games reversed thanks to LLMs, which can easily pattern match and operate on contrivedely optimized assembly and output reasonably accurate C/C++ code. I’m one of many right now using Ghidra + LLM workflow. It’s doing the thing it needs to and I’ve helped several communities revive and port their games this way. It is a huge time saver. While I’d perso…
I added several quality-of-life features / UX improvements to a very old game, “Deadlock: Planetary Conquest”[0]
I had no idea how to do any of this. I let GPT-5.5 download Ghidra + MCP connectors, start the project, and do all the work. I gave it my vision and gave it iterative user testing feedback.
Now I have a MUCH more playable UX.
O: https://store.steampowered.com/app/328440/Deadlock_Planetary...
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right? All Fable did was a ported an already cross platform project to ios. Does not look like any sort of heavy lifting there, opus 4.6 would do just fine
I read this and laugh a bit because just 7 months ago the bar was so much lower and now we go "well duh of course it was able to make a working ios app from a game made 20 years ago... a game that was made 3 years before the first iPhone"
>> well duh of course it was able to make a working ios app from a game made 20 years ago
But it didn't, thats the whole point. The game in question was updated like a day ago, not 20 years.
Fable added few config files for iOS and a gesture mapping to mouse events. It did not do any of the hard stuff.
The title is so misleading that it is probably the single reason why this made to the front page with people assuming it actually did anything hard here.
If anyone deserves the recognition - its the upstream projects that made the game modern and cross platform in the first place.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read this and laugh a bit because just 7 months ago the bar was so much lower and now we go "well duh of course it was able to make a working ios app from a game made 20 years ago... a game that was made 3 years before the first iPhone"
"it was able to get a macOS port of a 20 year old game to run on iOS" still very cool, and sci fi not long ago
Its not 20 years old, GeneralsX was updated like a day ago.
So the game in question is very modern and cross platform.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#245> rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal Am I reading that right? It makes API calls that go through 5 different layers before actually getting rendered? That's kind of crazy. I'm surprised it works, although I guess the underlying libraries are solid enough that it shouldn't be unexpected.
Apple never released a driver that supports Vulkan out of the box, therefore MoltenVK was born, which translates Vulkan IR to Metal source then recompiles to Metal shaders. This was the pipeline in Proton for macOS (I'm not sure if it's still is the case, been quite a while since I checked).
Proton itself doesn't exist for macOS, but CrossOver already existed instead, which is mostly the same tech, and indeed supports D3D either through DXVK over MoltenVK, or through Apple's D3DMetal.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed the day when they had their bun build misconfigured which ended up leaking the entirety of Claude Code's codebase? (I wish I was joking)
Pretty sure the author of Bun stated this was not related to Bun here on HN.
It was due to Anthropic's misconfiguration of Bun so you can argue it's not Bun's fault. IIRC it's the default config though, so maybe it's a little bit of Bun's fault but I didn't check that.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#247I think the next 10 years or so are going to see a chucklefuck of games reversed thanks to LLMs, which can easily pattern match and operate on contrivedely optimized assembly and output reasonably accurate C/C++ code. I’m one of many right now using Ghidra + LLM workflow. It’s doing the thing it needs to and I’ve helped several communities revive and port their games this way. It is a huge time saver. While I’d perso…
The mild alarm for me is that this won't be limited to just games. I've spent almost 30 years building applications for the web. I've been switching my attention to different models of distribution in part because I see a desire for people to not be paying monthly seat subscriptions, but also because it can simplify my own operations - I want to move to a solo indie dev model, and giving you an executable you run mea…
One area I think is really going to get slaughtered by LLMs are marketplace plugins. Those monthly fee plugins people release for things like Jira, Shopify, Salesforce, etc. There's a subset of those that don't have some backend that's hard to replicate, and asking an LLM to reverse engineer and make your own plugin is trivial.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your take is very interesting, but please do not forget that pirating games is a crime.
Reverse engineering and pirating are not the same thing (although the former may certainly be used as a means to achieve the latter). As long as you aren't distributing the game, distributing code that legitimate owners of the game can use to run their game on more platforms is not a crime.
>distributing code
The code is also copyrighted and owning a license for a game does not make you safe from being sued for pirating that game or its code. It's fine in this case only because the engine was open sourced.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#249I think the next 10 years or so are going to see a chucklefuck of games reversed thanks to LLMs, which can easily pattern match and operate on contrivedely optimized assembly and output reasonably accurate C/C++ code. I’m one of many right now using Ghidra + LLM workflow. It’s doing the thing it needs to and I’ve helped several communities revive and port their games this way. It is a huge time saver. While I’d perso…
We are also going to get shovelware without end. 1983 will seem like nothing by comparison.
Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, this is an actual good use of what sounds like a person guiding a model to do a mass conversion. This is quite the understatement. Actually, it's probably the understatement of the year. "Pretty good, not bad, great use case". Dude. Fable fucking did what ?
It hallucinated that people play games on Apple products.
I recommend you do even some basic cursory search on the size of the iOS gaming market VS consoles and desktops. You’ll find out your snark is embarrassingly misplaced. Look at the dates of the articles you find, too. Some will be almost fifteen years old.