Top all-time · #18807
banteg
Personal blog · banteg.xyz/postsprogramminggames
banteg is a personal blog at banteg.xyz about programming and games. Since 2026, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times, most often “Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in two weeks”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link banteg's Crimsonland post as an example of one person using LLMs to reverse engineer a non-trivial game and rewrite it in another language and graphics library in about two weeks.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writing by banteg on Ethereum, compilers, reverse engineering, games, and coding agents.
Most-linked posts?
- Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in two weeks3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-02-01
What Hacker News says?
People are just not realizing this now because it's mostly hobby projects and companies doing it in private, but eventually everyone will realize that LLMs allow almost any software to be reverse engineered for cheap. See e.g. https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/ , a single human with the help of LLMs reverse engineered a non-trivial game and rewrote it in another language + graphics lib in 2 weeks.
Comment linking /posts/crimsonland/
on “Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite”Submitted Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in two weeks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou can do this yourself with LLMs, but I admit that it's still not a trivial process. For the actual best results and the highest chance of progressing quickly, you really need a $200 OpenAI/Anthropic sub and a lot of free time. I seriously recommend OpenAI over Anthropic for this, as in my experience GPT 5.5 is far more thorough in reverse engineering and makes mistakes less often. Then, you first need some toolin…
Comment linking /posts/crimsonland/
on “Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable”Submitted Run Claude Code and Codex from Telegram with Takopi as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm very happy to see this! Not so much because of TDIII (which I played, although not nearly as much as Stunts), but because there seems to be some momentum building around recreating old games using AI agents, and I love that! I had explored some related ideas [0] but throwing Claude at the problem seems super promising. The recent Crimsonland thing [1] was great! [0] https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html […
Comment linking /posts/crimsonland/
on “Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)”Submitted Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game as a story · 1 points
HN discussion