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Comment by gritzko | Hacker News Reader

So much fun. I recently ported some old strategy games. Claude does it almost on its own http://replicated.live/blog/games

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Lots of talk of DOS, but both games that are described (Panzer General II and Imperialism II) were only released for Windows?

If the games had been for DOS, it would probably have made more sense to just run the original binaries in DOSBox-X or some other emulator. I think there is already some debug API that can be enabled. Or adding MCP or something similar to DOSBox(-X) would probably be a lot less work than to reimplement the games.

Ah, yes, sorry. At this point, XP and DOS are almost synonymous for me.

The entire point of the port was to add headless play for AI training. But porting the old interface and playing it in the browser was lots of fun. Can not upload that to GitHub, obviously.

> At this point, XP and DOS are almost synonymous for me.

IIRC Windows 9x & ME were based on (MS)DOS; but 2k and XP were based on NT, which was quite different.

(Note sure what those differences actually are, since I only started programming once I'd switched to Linux...)

That's correct. Personally as an MS-DOS retro enthusiast and programmer I don't know how anyone could call XP and DOS synonymous!

Exactly. I switched to Linux in the 90s.

So who or what ported them?

Opus 5.5.

Congrats to you on prompting

It is true what people say wrt using agentic development being like being a manager: you take an idea from elsewhere (a lot of game porting is happening right now), describe it to someone else who will do the hard work while you relax, and then at the end you as the team lead/manager claim all the credit.

I find it hard to congratulate someone on a project when they say Claude or whatever did it for them. It just feels so insincere. I myself wouldn't feel good getting compliments about something that I prompted into existence.

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