Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware | Hacker News Reader

Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware

werwolv.net

100 pointsspeckx16 comments

Director (and Lingo) is how I got started before moving to Flash and ActionScript for ad agency projects. Was such a fun time to be a developer - you could build whatever you wanted online and brands were being pretty adventurous.

I really liked Director. In the 90s I made a significant part of my living with Director projects.

I learned Director (and Authorware) a little in school. But by the time I graduated, Flash was the standout, and I specialized in it for almost a decade.

Same here, especially telco interactive CD-ROMs. Type of work that always was abundant for some reason or the other.

I did an odd interactive media course in college - not CS but lots of programming in various languages.

I loved Director and used it for many assignments. Made so many CD-ROMs, even 3d games using Shockwave and models we'd make in 3DS Max.

It was fun graduating and trying to get a job in 2003! Realising CD ROMs were becoming a thing of the past and having to immediately teach myself HTML and Flash.

On reflection it set the tone for the 20+ years of continuous learning and language swapping!

It is interesting! But if the goal was just to run the game, the mentioned archive.org page says "Nachdem zum dumpen eine ccd verwendet wurde sollte der Kopierschutz auch keine Probleme machen.

Zum Einbinden dieser ccd File empfehle ich WinCD."

So if he just ran the game from the original CCD image file, then it would just have worked. No clue why he had to convert the CCD to a ISO file and loose the copy protection support.

My goal was primarily to be able to get the game to run as easily as possible, without having to fiddle around with CD emulators and other stuff.

Basically just running an exe file and be done. This also allowed me to put the game on one of my Android Handhelds in the end! All these games are surprisingly touchscreen friendly :)

The article features the game "Findus 4". The CD copy protection was causing problems even when the game was sold back then. As a result, the publisher itself published a patch to remove the copy protection to make it compatible with Windows versions > NT5.0. The patch is still available in the Internet Archive. The diff between the originally shipped binary on the CD and the officially patched version from the publisher might be beneficial for further reverse engineering though.

The scummvm project has been working on porting most of the director games onto it. You can track its current status here:

https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Director/Games?hl=es-ES

I read this as Getting Old - Macromedia Director Games to run on modern hardware

Are todays LLM not capable of translating that stuff into modern JS&Co?

For sure. It’s coincidence, but a couple weeks back I had a frontier LLM decode one of those old Director games and port it to run in a web browser. Took about 2 hours. (it did re-use existing OSS libraries): https://github.com/foxtacles/findus3 (this even happens to be part of the game series the author is talking about in the blog post)

I’ve been decompiling and reversing games for over a decade before LLMs came into the picture. The most recent models are incredibly powerful. Basically no reason left to do any manual reversing anymore (if you only care about the end result)

If the LLM can’t run the original code, it can’t compare to verify the translation is accurate

LLMs are surprising good at looking at plain old hex of a binary and rewriting it as source code that functions similarly.

I'm sure for these older games they'd succeed most of the time.

Dunno about that. I am on a TRS-80 CoCo(6809 CPU) group elsewhere and the oldschoolers are creating some impressive things using Claude and the like.

When the runtime is completely different, I'd also argue it's emulation more than translation? Anyway. Lost in translation I guess.

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