Tracing the execution path and baking cycle-exact hardware state directly into C/WASM is clever engineering; it bypasses runtime emulation overhead entirely.
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.
The demoscene was all about human ingenuity getting the most out of the machine. It was about showing off how good your crew was at making things from nothing but their minds.
Now, it too, has been swallowed by the AI that is destroying this entire mode of being, the joy and creativity of writing code, of solving seemingly-impossible puzzles with ones mind.
My favorite creative and intellectual outlet is dying off and its killer is wearing its corpse as a costume.
Or an eternal heaven, our every wish coming true. The next iteration of homo sapiens will not be thinking how to do things, but what things to do. Is this the new creative space for us?
> That recording is translated into C - the original instructions, one for one, with the exact cycle timing of the emulated machine.
What's the advantage of this approach vs cycle-accurate emulation? (I'd guess it can go faster, due to compiler optimization?)
> The result is checked against the emulator event for event: every interrupt, port access and frame at the same moment of emulated time.
It's funny how LLMs leak their test procedure docs into user-facing output.
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.
The demoscene was all about human ingenuity getting the most out of the machine. It was about showing off how good your crew was at making things from nothing but their minds.
Now, it too, has been swallowed by the AI that is destroying this entire mode of being, the joy and creativity of writing code, of solving seemingly-impossible puzzles with ones mind.
My favorite creative and intellectual outlet is dying off and its killer is wearing its corpse as a costume.