Show HN: Black Ops II statically recompiled to native ARM64 macOS (github.com)
I grew up with Black Ops 2 and wanted to see if I could make it work on my 2020 MacBook Pro. So I used Claude Opus 5.5 to create a tool that converts your copy of the game (from Steam) to a native ARM64 Mac app, with almost 60fps in all areas. The whole game is statically recompilated ahead-of-time (AOT) and does not use any emulator whatsoever, be it Wine, Crossover or Rosetta. The best thing is the performance, although some heat issues are still to fix. You get to play the whole Campaign, local Multiplayer (with bots) and local Zombies (all DLCs maps; you need to have them in your Steam library obviously) at about 60fps. Split-screen was not in the PC version, but I've been working on it lately; it's coming soon! LAN mode is on the roadmap for later too :)
62 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] threadThis is very confusing to read, though:
What I wrote with Claude: [...] a hand-written runtime
To me you have to pick one or the other. Claude has no hands.
The restraint Anthropic added to Claude to stop it from reverse engineering commercial games is recently added
Massive chance these recompilations just ruined gaming for everyone.
Like on your own- do whatever.
As soon as you share it - you actually harm players, not help them
Nah that was microtransactions and associated corporate greed.
If we have good enough AI to force companies to do this, we have good enough AI to build any shit we want and we'll build better shit than what these companies are putting out.
>> and we'll build better shit than what these companies are putting out. feel free to share what you've built. Sure its possible just need to be real here - 1% will be good, 99% will be slop. And that 1% will down in that slop.
As a result though in theory you can make some games better than existing ones - the overall effect is net negative.
The AI will still recreate a game that it can view and interact with.
Almost every paragraph makes me want to ask: "so what?"
> There is no Wine and no JIT: the game runs as native code, in one process > the campaign runs at 51–60 frames per second
So what?
Is it a matter of running the game in itself? Was the game not running on Apple M-series in any way, so you're unlocking something that was impossible before?
Or does the game just ran faster (more FPS), load quicker, render better, what?
There's no comparison to how the game runs on x86, or how it runs on M-series with translation layers (IF it runs).
This is an exact manifestation of the AI slop problem. A lot of details. A lot of "how". A lot of "what". So little "why" - you need to read a lot and in the end your questions are never answered, and you don't understand if the project makes sense at all or is just something "we did it because we could". I'm perfectly happy to read AI generated text if it's properly and clearly written and answers the right questions.
Not sure about the other two, but WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's in the name :)
An emulator. In the context of computing translation software, "emulation" generally refers to emulating hardware rather than software. Hence why WINE Is Not an Emulator :)
Gives me a solid 60fps most of the time, with only the occasianal bug here and there that is often fixed in no time. Luckily i've added 10min auto save quite quickly, so that it does not cause that big of a problem.
Aside from the fun of both getting the game to work on this machine, and the fun of actually being able to play the game, it is a great way to find creative ways to work with LLM. Building out dev tools on the way that works for an LLM etc.
If it doesn’t lock up your machine every hour or so then it’s not a very authentic experience!
Unfortunately I think the party will end soon as anthropic are already preventing reimplementing games in there system prompts.