> I didn’t want to do a function-by-function port. First, APIs may be copyrightable - and copying a binary that closely might implicate copyright more than an approach closer to clean-room design. But it was clear that I needed some level of feedback from the ground-truth binary in order to provide a hill for the LLM to climb on the reimplementation.
Interesting, but isn't this what, say, the Ocarina of Time reverse engineer port does[1]? I imagine the fact that this hasn't been served a takedown notice from Nintendo is a proof that it's defensible? Or at least that there's precedent, ha.
Anyway, this is really cool. I genuinely think the only thing that's missing for me to waste an afternoon here is the sound effects!
It is like claiming that compiling Samba to run in $NEW_PLATFORM suddenly strips Samba of the GPLv3.
And then for the legal part, that's why it's called an exception.
And again, where is the interoperability here? Interoperability exception would apply if there was whitebox cryptography, Nintendo logo-style things or anything else where the only method for the work to run would be to violate copyright of _exactly that_. Under no circumstances you can simply copy & distribute the entire work (or derivates) while claiming "interoperability exception!". It makes utterly no sense.
And then for the interoperability, these decompilation projects are primarily made to target other systems, not the original platform. That's the textbook definition of interoperability.
Let's be real, N64 and the PS1/PS2 (where most of these projects are based) are crumbling old platforms at this point and these projects are sometimes the best way to run games when they exist.
The exception for interoperability only applies to _the minimum required_ for interoperability. You can use this exception to distribute e.g. game authorization code even if copyright would not allow you to do it.
You _cannot_ use this as an excuse to pirate the entire program, much less to create your own derivative work and distribute it!
This is just wishful thinking that comes up every so often in these threads (now it is the 5th time I see this parroted here). And then, when Nintendo inevitably shuts everything down, cue the crying. This ignorance is simply setting these projects for failure.
And Nintendo can pound sand, sorry. The only realistic ways to play those aging games is on an emulator or recompilation projects nowadays.
Nintendo also didn't strike these projects, maybe they are afraid of making a precedent.
There is a bazillion of jurisprudence about decompilation in the EU . Just search for your favorite case. I'm based in the EU (France). But FYI, despite what you may think, in practice the US is more lax about this than the EU is.
In the EU, for example, decompilation even if you don't distribute may very well be illegal (because it would be an unauthorized temporary copy of the program); the US courts are way more lax when it comes to these temporary never-distributed copies (which are almost always fair use, a concept that doesn't exist per-se in the EU). This is a big problem in the EU for security research (which obviously does not fall into interoperability).
Emulation would be acceptable, which is yet another reason the interoperability clause does not apply (since you _already_ have a way to interoperate that doesn't require distributing copyrighted software, and the EU interoperability clause very explicitly says that then it does _not_ apply).
And given these examples, it's very clear that recompilation to play on modern hardware is quite similar in spirit to translating a book into a different language, which makes it a derivative work. The other alternative is that there is insufficient creativity in the recompilation effort to merit independent copyright at all, in which case it's just plain copying of the original work. In either case, it's infringement.
Didn't Google v. Oracle disprove this?
There was a little-known sequel to SimTower called Yoot Tower (named after Yoot Saito). It was a commercial flop, but I played it in the 2000s and again in the 2010s and very much enjoyed it! It had a lot of added customizability (more choices of restaurants and shops, for one thing). I would love to see that game recreated.
"Tower Kit" was released, but I haven't been able to find an archive of the executable, just some web pages about it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000229064305fw_/http://www.ope...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000311043425/http://www.openbo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000310234154/http://www.openbo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000521002924fw_/http://www.ope...
There's even a monster movie version of "The Tower II Special Gamera Pack" released with “Gamera 3: Revenge of the Iris”!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamera_3:_Revenge_of_Iris
Here's a summary of Tower Kit:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/R...
>What's Tower Kit?
>Tower Kit is optional software for The Tower II. In The Tower II, you can select the stage where you want to start the game using the concept of a "map." The Tower II package comes with three maps: "Shinjuku Subcenter," "Hawaii Diamond Head," and "Kegon Falls," and the "Tower Kit" adds these maps. By installing this tower kit, a new stage game will begin. Tower kits don't just add more stages. Each map has new features, allowing you to play a completely new game.
>Please try the "Tower Kit" which allows for infinite variations.
>A love story between you, the person in charge of the Liberty Island redevelopment project, and two men and women who are your subordinates. Your work will have a subtle influence on the course of your love life. The Tower II is the first attempt at a crossover between redevelopment and love, set in New York. What is the ending...? [...]
If the first tile you build is a lobby in the bottom left corner, it is supposed to double your starting money. :)
Reading the process in TFA, it's very much dependent on the comprehensiveness of the testing framework. And apparently, the tests never built a lobby in the bottom left corner...
Anything else it didn't try, is probably also not documented and not implemented.
With the growing use of AI in reverse engineering, we might need to shift our goals to more strongly verifiable ones, such as matching decompilation.
My memory is that you could make multi-level lobbies on the first floor and you'd end up with like a grand staircase.
Edit: Apparently just pillars no staircase - https://old.reddit.com/r/SimTower/comments/1q63yvc/a_nice_to...
I agree that you need to be able to produce source code that matches the original binary before you can start porting things.
I never knew this!!
Man, pre big-internet was so hard to find information on games. I remember for the original tomb raider a friend needed a guide, so I wrote and printed out them a guide for the full game, since I played it pretty obsessively.
I've been leaning towards the latter, partially because I have an idea to replace one of the functions that's currently implemented as a horrible irreducible CFG that's a pain to understand with... some 16-bit AVX instructions. Mostly for the amusement of saying that I have used 16-bit AVX instructions.
I used dosbox to install Windows 3.1, then installed simtower in that. It's not the native window manager integration you'd get in wine, but worked very well. Some ui glitches but nothing that affected usability.
Worth noting I'm running Linux
that doesnt sound too terrible to be honest. TIL that 8am-2pm is 2x usage.
I'm gonna Google that and see what I got wrong
...however I don't think that the source was ever published anywhere, considering that the repository still doesn't have the source code yet. ("Please check out the YootTower repo, where I'll publish the source code once it's cleaned up, reviewed and approved by Yoot, and relicensed with the MIT licensed.")
Meanwhile I'm working on Micropolis (based on the original SimCity Classic code, cleaned up, and compiled with Emscripten into WASM), and also reimplementing The Sims character animation system and content management and creation system in TypeScript with WebGPU and MOOLLM. ;)
Micropolis WASM + WebGL tile renderer demo:
MicropolisCore repo:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
Micropolis design docs:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/tree/main/design...
Sims character animation demo with WebGPU renderer:
Source code:
https://github.com/DnfJeff/SimObliterator_Suite/tree/main/vi...
Design docs:
https://github.com/DnfJeff/SimObliterator_Suite/tree/main/vi...
Designs for creating LLM driven Sims content editing and creation tools, uplifting and simulating The Sims in MOOLLM, and downloading The Sims content back into the original game:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/designs/sim-ob...
>"What would your Sims say if they could finally talk to you?"
>Two-way bridge between The Sims 1 save files and MOOLLM. Characters, objects, and pets step between a 26-year-old game VM and an LLM-powered universe, retaining and synchronizing their parallel existences.
>The One-Line Version
>Drag a 25-year-old Sims save file in. Watch the character wake up. Have a conversation with them. Send them home changed.
The Uplift: Sims ↔ MOOLLM Character Bridge
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/sim-ob...
It's all still a work in progress that I hack on when I have spare time (and spare money for tokens), so no ship date known! ;)
(I said "Wow!" in my head, if that means anything; I'm just used to games-designers of mid-1990s all being virtual recluses by now - or long into retirement).
May I ask a few things about SimTower that have been stuck with me since I was 9 years old (and my apologies if these questions have been asked already):
* What's stopping the source-code to the Win95/MacOS SimTower being released? I assumed Yoot retained core IP rights because Maxis was largely a re-packager and distributor... but if Maxis did buy the copyright to the source then it would sit with EA now - and EA themselves have been surprisingly cool with open-sourcing lately (Command & Conquer, etc) so could we see something happen on this front?
* Why did SimTower's ground lobbies and sky-lobbies get completely different artwork - but only for the first few hundred pixels - if you build offset from the left-edge of the map? And what are the different objects in the lobby artwork meant to be? I'm not sure if I'm looking at a row of green cash-registers or payphones - or something else.
* What inspired the endgame victory condition? (...do any towers in real-life have a consecrated cathedral on their summits? it just seemed an odd thing overall, even moreso given that Japan and Japanese urban (and urban-planning) culture doesn't make me suddenly think of Christianity.
(I now feel embarrassed for getting all fanboyish around you, lol; sorry!)
Here is a deep dive "podcast" he generated (presenting Claud's analysis in a conversational format) that describes the work. I listened to it, and it got the important trademark and licensing issues right, was quite comprehensive and technically accurate, up until the end where they said maybe there's something to learn about city planning from SimCity! ;)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SGAkLIb4CQMPKU7TJ2sRdEjc0Dh...
It pretty much parallels the analysis docs in his repo, which are also quite accurate:
https://github.com/FabianWesner/micropolis/tree/master/docs
This lightning talk I gave at HAR 2009 goes into what you can actually learn from playing SimCity/Micropolis (and reading and extending the code), thanks to Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's philosophy of Constructionist Education, and it's much wider and more generally useful than just city planning:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
To save you the indignity of LinkedIn scraping your browser extensions, here is a copy of Fabian Wesner's post and my response with the link spying urls resolved:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fabian-wesner_micropolis-simc...
Fabian Wesner | CTO | Passionate about AI and Entrepreneurship | 1 month ago
Claude Code is extremely good at documenting legacy software. That's a huge blessing, especially when the original developers are no longer around or are finally ready to retire.
If you haven't tried this, you might be missing out. So I did it for you.
#Micropolis is the open-source release of the original #SimCity, published by Electronic Arts in 1989. EA released the source code under GPLv3 in 2008 for the One Laptop Per Child project. The codebase is decades old, and there's likely no one left who knows it inside out.
SimCity was one of the very first games I played, back in 1990 on my father's 286. Just a few months after the Wall fell. So this one is personal.
I let Claude Code read the entire codebase and write a full documentation. As far as I can see, it looks correct and complete. I'm no expert on this particular codebase, but that's exactly the point: there might be no expert left on earth. I have tried this on other software where I am an expert, and the results are surprisingly accurate.
You can find the resulting docs and the prompt here: https://github.com/FabianWesner/micropolis/tree/master/docs
I also converted the docs into a podcast episode for easier consumption:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SGAkLIb4CQMPKU7TJ2sRdEjc0Dh...
Enjoy!
I know I’m not the first to use Claude Code on this treasure and - of course - I already rebuilt the game with JavaScript.
More on this tomorrow!
Don Hopkins | Full Stack Generalist AI Engineer
Although I may have two feet firmly planted in mid-air, I am still on Earth and know the code. I reviewed it and am I'm impressed with this documentation, which even caught my experimental Eliza chatbot easter egg in the PyGTK version! Importantly it correctly covered all the licensing and trademark issue, and mentioned that active development has moved on to the cleaned up and renovated MicropolisCore repo.
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
Here are the latest design docs:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/tree/main/design...
The documentation you generated does a good job at mapping out and comparing the several different versions of the code. Albert Hofkamp and I cleaned up and refactored the code into C++ MicropolisCore (which I integrated with Python with SWIG, and later WebAssembly with emscripten/embind), and we wrote Doxygen comments and documentation in the code.
Chaim Gingold deeply studied multiple versions of the SimCity source code for his PhD thesis in Play Design, and interviewed many people involved, then wrote the definitive magnum opus "Building SimCity". Chaim is the one person on Earth who understands SimCity better than Will Wright!
https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5791/Building-SimCity...
>Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine
>A deep dive into the trailblazing simulation game SimCity, situating it in the history of games, simulation, and computing. Building SimCity explores the ...
Good grief you can't hide easter eggs any more!
"Additionally, the web version includes: PacBot -- an AI robot that follows roads toward heavy traffic and "eats" cars, reducing traffic density. This was an early experiment in programmable game avatars."
PacBot appears one minute into this video:
https://youtu.be/8snnqQSI0GE?t=56
>Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo. A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SGAkLIb4CQMPKU7TJ2sRdEjc0Dh...
I can certainly believe a much larger app like SimTower could overwhelm an LLM-based process without a lot of handholding as even Solitaire required a fair bit of that from me. I'm hoping to take on 1991's A-Train next (the game that inpired SimCity 2000's interface).
I’ll have to check this out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8o7gg87k4
Condom Duck:
https://youtu.be/qq8o7gg87k4?t=211
Psycho Party:
https://youtu.be/qq8o7gg87k4?t=381
Cursor Camp (recent hn discussion and neil.fun link):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949939
Also, LGR did these great reviews of SimTower and Yoot Tower, which he truly loves, so he disclaims that they are not exactly non-biased:
LGR - SimTower - PC Game Review (15 years ago):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ToEDrhxo0
LGR - Yoot Tower: The Sequel to SimTower (5 years ago):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqNECXCd9iU
Yoot interviewed many interesting people for MACWORLD Japan, like Joanna Hoffman, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Douglas Engelbart, and Alan Kay. Here's a transcript of Yoot Saito's interview of Alan Kay that he shared with me and I cleaned up and linked out:
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
A Journey Through Computing History with Yoot Saito and Alan Kay
Yoot towers wisely,
Alan constructs the future --
foundations of change.
In this captivating interview from 1993, recently unearthed and previously published only in Japan, renowned game designer Yutaka "Yoot" Saito of MACWORLD Japan engages with computing pioneer Alan Kay in a deep exploration of technology's past and future. This dialogue, captured on a cassette tape and transcribed, spans the evolution of personal computing, highlighting groundbreaking advancements and visionary ideas that have shaped modern technology. Yoot Saito, celebrated for his innovative approach to game design, and Alan Kay, known for his seminal contributions such as the development of the graphical user interface and the concept of the Dynabook, offer profound insights into both the historical trajectory and the potential futures of the digital world. This interview serves as a treasure trove of historical anecdotes, philosophical reflections, and forward-looking innovations, capturing a moment when two brilliant minds discussed the dynamics of technological progress.
----
I'd love to find all of Yoot's original interviews published in MacWorld Japan. Yoot was very active introducing and working with technology and researchers from the US with Japan in the early days of the Mac, and he pioneered psychological chat based AI games using voice recognition and synthesis, like Seaman.
Seaman - Sega's Strangest Expedition Into Artificial Intelligence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV0zpPSXOx4
Yoot Saito on His Classic Sega Game Where You Take Abuse from a Fish:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yoot-saito-on-his-classic-se...
I found a couple of MacWorld Japan CDROM archives on Internet Archive, but my Mac says it can't mount the iso files. It appears to be an old HFS file system -- does anybody know how to to mount these treasures on a modern mac, with an emulator maybe? Or have the actual magazines lying around?
https://archive.org/details/macworld-japan-vol-1-1995-01
https://archive.org/details/macworld-japan-vol-2-1995-09
MACWORLD-VOL-1-1995-01.iso: Apple Driver Map, blocksize 512, blockcount 460003, devtype 0, devid 0, driver count 0, contains[@0x200]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 2, start block 1, block count 2, name Quick TOPiX by OMI, type Apple_partition_map, valid, allocated, readable, contains[@0x400]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 2, start block 3, block count 460000, name MACWORLD-ROM Vol. 1, type Apple_HFS, valid, allocated, readable
This perfectly describes what feels off to me about Opus 4.7 (unsure if that’s what you are using). It seems to go down an incorrect path, I correct it, but it still references things from it. Trying to direct it back becomes a mess.
Has anyone experience this as well or am I going crazy? Doesn’t happen with 4.6 for me.
I’m probably holding it wrong, but I think a given a sufficiently advanced AI it would essentially be impossible to use it incorrectly. Feels like a step backwards in this regard.
I don't think I ever made it to the cathedral though.
This is kind of the perfect use case though -- it's a game who cares if it's right or not.