Show HN: Reviving a 20-year-old puzzle game Chromatron with Ghidra and AI (quesma.com)

Play: https://p.migdal.pl/chromatron-oxide/ Repo: https://github.com/stared/chromatron-oxide/ (educational purpose only) The original: https://www.silverspaceship.com/chromatron/

Full story in the blog post.

duskwuff 5 days ago

The source code to Chromatron was made available on the game's forum at one point. Here's a copy I saved:

https://gist.github.com/duskwuff/513e2b4f38b3db2e060c8611ebf...

A couple of helper functions are missing, but nothing terribly important.

stared 5 days ago

I wasn't aware it existed - and thanks for saving!

And wow, this code is beautiful.

ticulatedspline 4 days ago

FWIW game works fine on windows 11 64bit. went to https://www.silverspaceship.com/chromatron/ ran the exe. fun game.

stared 4 days ago

It is good to hear that!

So, as always, the problem is not with gaming, but Apple gaming.

casey2 5 days ago

Very nice. But "Models excel at code, but not at visual inspection" is limited, Claude excel's at code cause that is anthropics main focus. Google will leapfrog them soon.

I could never see Claude doing this without a human in the loop, while Google has probably already reverse engineered a good chunk of the software available on the web

stared 5 days ago

When dealing with binaries, Gemini 3.1 Pro is in the same tier as Opus 4.6, https://quesma.com/benchmarks/binaryaudit/. Here are the results without humans in the loop, fully end-to-end.

For any practical development, you want humans in the loop, just precisely as much as it is needed (e.g. to ask the right questions, not to get steered away), but not more.

rsalus 5 days ago

Doubtful.

xnx 5 days ago

Similar recent project for Skyroads: https://github.com/ammaarreshi/SkyRoads-Codex

alberto-m 6 days ago

Excellent article, thanks!