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Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

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Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#251

Post by bornfreddy »

tonyarkles wrote: post #190
dalleh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please explain more your Ghidra+LLM workflow? What you are doing and how does the LLM help you? Thanks!

Not the person you asked but I frequently use Claude (Opus primarily) to reverse engineer embedded hardware. It uses a mix of Ghidra, Radare2, and just the arm-none-* tools. I can’t say I have a particular workflow though, I just say “we’re reverse engineering foo.bin. It’s the firmware for a servomotor. We talk to the servo over RS485 and it seems that if I send it command X it will sometimes silently reject the com…

> Let’s keep notes in @20260704-reverse-engineer-foo-motor.qmd

Curious - why like this? I usually tell it to write down the analysis once all is clear, so I'm wondering if your approach is better.

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#252

Post by unnamed76ri »

nerdsniper wrote: post #242
tangenter wrote: post #162

I 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...

Are your changes available to download?

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#253

Post by swiftcoder »

charcircuit wrote: post #248
swiftcoder wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may run afoul of DCMA rules around circumventing copy protection measures, and you are most likely going to be violating the EULA on any recent games. But you aren't necessarily violating any copyrights - several high-profile cases in the US have been fought about this, such as Sony vs Connectix, and its generally fallen on the side of reverse-engineering for interoperability being within the bounds of fair use

(as always, IANAL)

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#254

Post by flohofwoe »

TL;DR: nothing to see here, HN title is extremely misleading

> rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal.

Ok, *this* is a bit weird. Why create such a jenga tower of indirections instead of directly letting the LLM port the rendering code from D3D8 to Metal either through a D3D8-to-Metal shim or even better by creating a new Metal-based render layer beneath the higher level game specific rendering code? I would expect that the LLM can 'see through' all those redundant shims and collapse them into the equivalent Metal code.

Also the readme says 'no emulation', but then goes on to describe the rendering layer as emulating D3D8 on top of Vulkan on top of Metal ;)

(also why are both Meson and CMake required)

PS: after reading more, it can be explained by what this project does (and it's not what the HN title says): it's not a port from the original C&C Generals code release to macOS/iOS, instead all the heavy lifting (of making the original code base portable, and providing example ports to Linux and macOS) was all already done by an existing project (https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX), all that this project did was slightly enhance the existing macOS version so that it also runs on iOS.

Suddenly this is much less impressive and could probably have been done just as well with older and simpler models (or tbh, a few hours or at most a few evenings of manual coding - macOS and iOS code is nearly identical for this type of application).

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#255

Post by charcircuit »

swiftcoder wrote: post #253
charcircuit wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You may run afoul of DCMA rules around circumventing copy protection measures, and you are most likely going to be violating the EULA on any recent games. But you aren't necessarily violating any copyrights - several high-profile cases in the US have been fought about this, such as Sony vs Connectix, and its generally fallen on the side of reverse-engineering for interoperability being within the bounds of fair use (…

Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc. establishes the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test for determining if a program is infringing on another program. Reverse engineered code of a nontrivial portion of the original program will have substantial similarity to the original program and will fail this test.

Interoperability falls under what gets filtered out in the filtration step of the test.

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#256

Post by Obscurity4340 »

gregoryl wrote: post #110
shibel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m (sorry for the lack of humbleness) a very fluent non-native speaker and writer, and this is by far my biggest challenge with Claude. It stitches together 2-4 advanced concepts into one or two words and I always have to ask it to “unpack”. I don’t think it’s easy on native speakers when it happens, but it’s even harder when you’re not.

Its hard for native speakers. Information density makes for rough reading.

It honestly feels more like chunking to me

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#258

Post by Wowfunhappy »

andai wrote: post #134
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build No, I'm pretty sure it is, actually, since June 17: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181 >> Upgraded the bundled Bun runtime to 1.4 Now, Bun 1.4 doesn't seem to officially exist on https://bun.com/blog or https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases , so I can't be 100% sure this is the Rust version. However, I have to do some…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609168 https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewri... > 13,044 unsafe blocks in the resulting Rust code (hand-written Rust projects of similar size average ~73) Grok is this true? I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny. Hang on. A claim like that can be verified with a single grep! Give me a minu…

...but isn't Zig code entirely unsafe?

I've never understood why people make fun of Rust code that has lots of unsafe blocks. Obviously, the goal is to reduce those blocks, but consider also the number of safe blocks!

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#259

Post by Fnoord »

charcircuit wrote: post #248
swiftcoder wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Nothing makes you safe from getting sued.

See also: [1]. You could also reverse engineer in a solid jurisdiction.

I ran C&C Generals in Wine on Linux back in the days. More stable than Windows XP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

Re: Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

#260

Post by flohofwoe »

embedding-shape wrote: post #233
port11 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the title is incorrect. Generals has been on the macOS App Store for years.

> Then the title is incorrect. Generals has been on the macOS App Store for years. Neither the HN submission or GitHub repository says it's first or novel though? Just that it's (another) port of it?

The HN title makes it sound like Fable did the port from the original code base to macOS and iOS, but this is very wrong (the project's readme does a much better job). It's merely enhanching an existing macOS version to also run on iOS, which tbh is very trivial and not at all impressive for any LLM.

The actually important work (of making the original code release portable and then create Linux and macOS ports) had already been done in https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX. There is really not much to see here.

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