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.