zlacker

[return to "Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game"]
1. exogen+jm9[view] [source] 2026-02-04 06:09:25
>>banteg+(OP)
I've been thinking about this topic and am glad to see it come up: AI is going to be a huge boon for digital preservation & restoration projects like this. I realized this while building this project (a map explorer for Tribes 2): https://exogen.github.io/t2-mapper/

Old games like this have a small (and shrinking) audience of people who care about them. With Tribes 2, for example, there are only ~50 people who actively play on a regular basis. A subset of those people are programmers, and a subset of those have the time & energy to put into a project like t2-mapper, assuming they're even interested. I got a basic version working, but then Claude Code helped decode and convert obsolete Dynamix/Torque3D file formats (improving existing Blender addons that were incomplete), got TorqueScript running in the browser, wrote shaders, and generally helped figure out what the original C++ code was doing.

In the past, you'd need the stars to perfectly align for stuff like this to happen: a passionate super-fan with the time, resources, knowledge, and persistence to see it through. Now, you mostly just need the persistence (and maybe a couple hundred bucks for tokens). I foresee people with niche interests (but not necessarily a programmer's skillset) being able to extend the lifetime (and maybe audience) of their obscure or obsolete software.

◧◩
2. aktau+8G9[view] [source] 2026-02-04 08:56:26
>>exogen+jm9
This is great. I'd love to do something similar for Ground Control (2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Control_(video_game)).

Do you have a writeup of how you did it? Both (regular) tooling (radare2? rizin? IDA? ...) and how the LLM did (or did not) use it?

In the little spare time I have, I've been able to reverse engineer the "compressed" file format (ended up being basically a XOR'ed zlib-compressed TAR-like archive), but not much else. I have not used LLMs to help me.

[go to top]