The approach really boils down to just giving the LLM the clear target of 100% binary compatibility with the same toolchain. It makes it easy for it to check its work and iterate towards it.
It's probably a couple of months of intermittently using £15pm subscriptions between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google; nowhere near maxing them out.
MSC 5.1 is a relatively simple compiler; and there's lots of prior art on Civ 1. I've set them off on a slightly more obscure and recent game now; so we'll see how well they manage on that!
Regarding legality - IANAL so perhaps we'll see. I just wanted to see how the sausage was made.
Interestingly; the way that MSC51 and LINK 5 lay out the binary depends on identifier names. There's also length restrictions due to memory limitations. So although the names aren't going to be historically accurate; the possibilities are at least bounded!
Cool! Is this an approach that you could in theory use to other games / programs too? What about license, is this legal?
The approach really boils down to just giving the LLM the clear target of 100% binary compatibility with the same toolchain. It makes it easy for it to check its work and iterate towards it.
It's probably a couple of months of intermittently using £15pm subscriptions between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google; nowhere near maxing them out.
MSC 5.1 is a relatively simple compiler; and there's lots of prior art on Civ 1. I've set them off on a slightly more obscure and recent game now; so we'll see how well they manage on that!
Regarding legality - IANAL so perhaps we'll see. I just wanted to see how the sausage was made.
So essentially the source code is LLM's best guess what the original might look like, as long as it compiles the same binary the goal is met.
Exactly yes.
Interestingly; the way that MSC51 and LINK 5 lay out the binary depends on identifier names. There's also length restrictions due to memory limitations. So although the names aren't going to be historically accurate; the possibilities are at least bounded!
I love the curiosity despite the possible legal consequences. It's in the spirit of Hacker News.