still cool but the title makes it sound like it was done from scratch
Damn, I still have the CD in one of my unopened boxes from our last move.
> Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes)
It’s cool that someone took the extra steps to run it on iPad and iOS, but if the README is correct then it was already ported to macOS? Going from Mac to iPad isn’t trivial, but it’s a much smaller jump than porting into the Apple world the first time.
> "ERROR! Failed to install app '2732960' (No subscription)"
This is of course mentioned in the read me.
So if that is released to the public, it's in the public domain, no license is applicable.
A great use for what AI can help with, especially in the hands of dedicated fans. Maybe I will find some time to try and experiment with custom maps or units, the modding scene of C&C Generals was always pretty lively.
the result: http://jhedin.github.io/merlin-s-revenge/
reasonably it works quite close to the lingo, but this is way difficult, and not just from being rusty. steve had most things triggered on the animation frame, which opus hasnt quite figured out by looking at the code and pulling stuff out of the .dir
i do remember that playing at double scale was a lot harder in general, but theres a really clear cooldown missing between attackes
Another great case study in why native Vulkan drivers would be a boon for Apple's mobile computing. That's quite the render pipeline...
I wonder if we’ll get to a situation where a new game is reversed in the first few months by a team effort. Right now it’s mostly solo devs, but a technical team that’s capable without LLMs is unstoppable with them, and given the nature of modding communities, the only thing they are missing is an LLM to grind away at the details of the game that would otherwise take years to find out.
The stakes are low, it’s mostly for fun and you can iterate on it. Compare this with Bun which was just like, “hey we converted everything to Bun to Rust from Zig, of course it works, what could possibly go wrong, I’ll totally write up a blogpost (that still doesn’t exist) explaining what we did, you can put this into your production environment soon!”
This is another "AI-ism" I noticed, mostly in coding agents - they seem to be very fond of making up new "compound nouns" (and occasionally verbs) to sum up relatively complex and specific concepts into single noun phrases. I wasn't sure if it's to save tokens or if the AI uses this to get a concise "identifier" for a concept that it can refer back to later, but I found it very noticeable.
I find the resulting sentences hard to read, though it does get better if you're aware of that tendency and make a conscious effort to parse the noun phrases. But I guess since it's just intermediate output from coding agents and not text for essays or blog posts, it's fine.
This means you can play for maybe 10 minutes on the happy path but just as you are getting into the zone either a CTD or some strange event would make the game/simulation unplayable.
And while debugging is made easier, it's much more effort than telling the model to convert the code. Hence it's usually not done in these demos.
Am I reading that right? It makes API calls that go through 5 different layers before actually getting rendered? That's kind of crazy. I'm surprised it works, although I guess the underlying libraries are solid enough that it shouldn't be unexpected.
This started back in February and looking at commits, Fable did only a small part of the latest commits. 19 commits out of 2000:
https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/commits...
And maybe it wasn't even Fable, they might have downgraded to Opus.
This is the kind of frequent misinformation that makes me skeptical of Anthropic LLM claims. Whenever I compare them to GPT 5.5 on my web dev workflows, they seem to trade blows, even Fable, which I started testing since it was re-enabled.
Also I bet any decent LLM could have done such port. Think GLM 5.2 or similar which would probably work better because it doesn't constantly try to guess if I'm a terrorist trying to hack goverments or develop some biological weapon.
People just don't have the resources to compare LLMs and imply whatever they used is the best thing ever and unlocked some new workflow.
I have seen little improvement since Opus 4.6.
One big caveat with iPad and mobile, though, is battery usage. I strongly suspect that power consumption is the reason that a number of games made it to Mac, but not iPad.
Wait. It's a port from a game from 2003. I don't think PC had 4 GB of memory back then (unless my memory is fuzzy, ah!): I mean, maybe some had that, but not the majority. I doubt the requirements for the original C&C Generals were 4 GB of memory.
OK, I just checked on a box of C&C Generals on eBay: requirement 128 MB of RAM (I know I could have asked a LLM, but checking a picture of an actual box is kinda fun).
I understand the need for a bit more graphics etc. but that's still a big jump: if the reqs were 128 MB or RAM for the PC, the game wasn't using that.
So we're talking something like a 32x inflation in RAM usage during the port (unless I didn't understand the caveat).
Why can't a game requiring 128 MB in 2003 run on machine 20 years more recent without using all the RAM?
Is there a plausible reason or are we to consider that when porting using Fable, we can expect the RAM usage of a program to go up by 32x?
EDIT: the original game has more asset than I would have guessed, skimming through the port's docs I found this:
> the game requires .big archive files (INIZH.big, MapsZH.big, etc.) totaling 4-5 GB. These files cannot be committed to repository due to copyright (EA Games property).
4 / 5 GB is not nothing. I wonder if the memory issue could be related to the way these are loaded?
Seems like an impossible ask to verify if you don't have an immense test suite that covers everything.
What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.
Then, you first need some tooling, either Ghidra (open-source) or IDA (paid), and some tooling to expose them to an LLM. I have a custom IDA Python-based CLI that lets LLMs trivially call into IDA's Python APIs from CLI, but there are tens of different Ghidra/IDA MCP/CLI/SQL projects out there.
After that, it becomes more mechanical, you just let the agent (or multiple agents) explore and start renaming (easier to start with functions + globals), better if it's something that's directly applied to the suite you're using, so that all names show up everywhere. This is actually quite a quick process, especially for older/smaller games. After you have enough function names, you need to instruct and have LLMs add actual types, so that the decompile doesn't have raw casts and offsets, but real fields + types. They will also need to apply types to globals and functions.
Afterwards comes the hardest part - you can export this very well named/annotated decompile, and do one of:
1) Have the LLM try to directly polish the code enough to be compilable. Despite of the decompile quality, this isn't as hard as it sounds.
2) Have the LLM recreate the project from scratch in another language, something like https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/. This can be easier to get initial results, but you're sure to hit tons of bugs due to the differences in implementations.
The 1st approach is more thorough, especially because you can find a matching C/C++ compiler and start doing actual decomp.dev-like work - binary matching functions so your source code compiles down to the exact bytes as in the original binary. This is the longest, hardest part, human community projects take years to complete, and LLMs still struggle with getting matches for 100%, so you might spend weeks-months, and tons of LLM usage - an agent can take like an hour to match a single 1000-byte function in worst case.
As a small note - you do not need to binary match 100% to have the game be absolutely playable. Compilers are often very tricky to lead, so you might already have the code that does exactly the same thing, but just a different local variable layout might make the compiler use different registers.
Most of these low-hanging bugs would have been caught upstream by now.
You can sidestep flags by just compacting and then changing the model back at any rate.
This was the pipeline in Proton for macOS (I'm not sure if it's still is the case, been quite a while since I checked).
It's not the "clean room" approach and companies could still claim it violates some kind of copyright and get it taken down.
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert
This seems to be the most active port saying it works on a Mac/Linux https://github.com/Daft-Freak/CnC_and_Red_Alert
cnc-ddraw i think would get it to run fine on a steam deck though, so you should be able to play it without much issue
> The naive plan (port EA's raw source) is a multi-month job. The actual job was "port the best community fork," which was a one-session job.
https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/blob/ma...
> Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes)
Fable added 19 commits on top of the parent fork, which did not use AI.
You can see the diff of what Fable added here: https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/compare...
My custom IDA CLI is just a simple thing on top of IDA Python's integration + ida-domain + some higher-level helpers, and works as a daemon with workers, so a stale/bad request doesn't corrupt an IDA DB (an issue I had when I was using idasql).
A bit offtopic, but: do you have any links to your efforts? I'm curious to see what other people do in this area.
This is quite the understatement. Actually, it's probably the understatement of the year.
"Pretty good, not bad, great use case".
Dude. Fable fucking did what?
It works great just like that.
Seems doubtful, I'd put money on it being something like Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. Maybe CC could claim the (odious) title of most actively used vibe-coded development app, though.
Theoretically you could clean room by having different agents/models/context windows to do both decompilation and reimplementation. This is untested in court afaik and I don't think anyone wants to spend money to find out.
There was a non-clean room reimplementation of gta3 a few years ago. The gta publisher DMCAd and of course the fans who did it didn't have any money to fight in court (and probably couldn't find anyone who would take a big complicated case on such bad facts pro bono). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/02/take-two-interactive-h...
Blogposts were promised, details were hinted, but no, it’s just full steam ahead because the AI worked so well. The converted unit tests all worked, all the synthetic tests are okay, so what are you complaining about?
At some point, it’s less about the technical questions and more about getting that pesky human buy-in.
- I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build
- Claude Code is not a particularly complicated piece of software from an engineering perspective (nor it's particularly well-engineered, at least at the moment).
So in my book "it runs Claude Code" would be pretty weak evidence that the rewrite is going to be successful (the tests they've done are much better evidence, but that's a topic for another time).
Huh... it looks to me like bun has yet to cut a release post Zig->Rust port (the latest one on github is still on a branch that says it's written in zig in the readme). I assume that nothing is using the rust version yet...
Which also cuts against the complaints about "of course it works [...] you can put this into your production environment soon!" since they don't seem to be asserting either of those things.
I... somehow did not know that.
It's a thing in some Germanic languages. Instinct is to merge nouns into word, e.g. 'lawnchair', but that gives you a red squiggly line, but 'lawn chair' also looks wrong, so 'lawn-chair' is the middle ground.
I don’t think it’s easy on native speakers when it happens, but it’s even harder when you’re not.
--- AGENTS.md ---
## Plain words, not jargon
Don't use jargon-as-shorthand. Say what you actually mean.
- Don't say "load-bearing assumptions". Say "the assumptions the xyz depends on".
- Don't say "cross-service". Name both services, e.g. "whether the X service can derive duration without calling the Y service". "Cross-X" is confusing because it hides which things are involved.
- Don't deliver verdicts as abstract noun-phrases like "Cross-RCA double-counting is unfounded". Say it plainly: "I checked whether the same root cause gets counted twice across RCA runs, and it doesn't."
## No earth-shattering declarations
Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything", "now I have the full picture", "this changes the game", etc. Just state what you found plainly. Most findings are ordinary; report them that way.
## Don't reflexively hedge a "yes"
When the answer is yes, say yes. Don't soften every positive answer with a caveat: it erodes confidence in the "yes". Only add a caveat when there's a genuine, specific uncertainty worth flagging.
Then recently I found https://github.com/bkerler/ida_rpc which seems to be ~60% the same thing as the one I have, the only big difference is that I do not give any special commands to LLMs, they just have to write Python in scripts/inline heredocs to interact with IDA. This lets them do a lot more interesting things since they get a full programming language.
This is an example of how LLMs work with idagent (`ida` is implicitly imported, ida.types, ida.comments is helper's own wrappers): https://paste.debian.net/hidden/cf46a122
More interesting example that was used to let the LLM/me track the rename progress for the initial function renames + gaps (code-looking like bytes that weren't inside of functions, IDA's autoanalysis missed some real functions). Although the game turned out to be small enough with only ~1500 real game functions that needed renames, which was done in ~10 hours of agent time total I think (I didn't parallelize with multiple agents). https://paste.debian.net/hidden/bf458b3a
To be honest, you can probably have an agent vibecode a similar tool to the one I have in about an hour :)
On another note, I find AI instructions like this (e.g. "Don't hype findings. Skip "a critical finding changes everything",...") more harm than good in my own uses. It changes behavior in subtle ways that makes it less predictable to me. I'd rather it has its own AI-isms and quirks, that I've fully gotten used to, and I know what to expect. I know when it says certain things, in certain ways, that's what I think it means. Quirks and AI-isms don't annoy me, I get used to how it states things.
Anyway: in my case Opus absolutely did not follow a similar instruction in the CLAUDE.md file. (But then again: it hardly followed _any_ CLAUDE.md instruction properly)
"Yes, the AI rewrote the code. No, we do not pretend that we've scrutinized the code, or that we understand it. It works, tests pass, so we don't care, and so shouldn't you."
The "recklessness" is offered as the new normal. Because it kinda, well, works for them.
No, I'm pretty sure it is, actually, since June 17:
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181
>> Upgraded the bundled Bun runtime to 1.4
Now, Bun 1.4 doesn't seem to officially exist on https://bun.com/blog or https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases, so I can't be 100% sure this is the Rust version. However, I have to do some patching of the Claude Code binary to get it to run on my OS, and version 2.1.181 coincided with some changes that make suspect it's using Rust now.
When someone on another social media platform commented expressed some concern, his response was to ask him what the explicit bug he was talking about was and that he would generate a fix. That sound you hear is the woosh as the point flies by. And in general, this just feels like a consistent problem with Bun.
The problem is what comes next. They now have code that they don't understand, and they are likely to work on it with AI in the future, but the new features they may introduce later will not have the luxury of hand-written tests and a reference code. So, unless they undertake the massive effort needed to fully understand the Rust code and deal with all these "unsafe", quality is very likely to go down, Microslop style.
There're some D3D implementations over Metal that could skip the Vulkan layer but none implement the old D3D8 so you'd still need another layer that implements e.g. D3D8 over D3D9-11. Also, DXVK and MoltenVK have got a lot of traction and fixes on their own, so they're probably the most accurate pipeline for D3D on Metal.
English word origins are a fascinating rabbit hole.
No, it’s good. When they stop doing this, it’ll be harder spot the machine slop.
Also they're probably interested in the team just as an acqui-hire of good developers, and they're probably interested in the marketing value of converting the actual bun to rust via LLMs. But mostly I'd assume it was about needing the team to effectively direct the LLMs.
Zero Hour running natively on Apple Silicon Macs, iPhone, and iPad — campaign, skirmish, and Generals Challenge, with touch controls built for RTS (tap-select, drag-box, long-press deselect, two-finger scroll, pinch zoom). No emulation: this is the real 2003 engine compiled for ARM64, rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal.
Built on EA's GPL v3 source release, standing on a chain of community work —
TheSuperHackers,
Fighter19's original Unix port, and
fbraz3/GeneralsX — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS
port and a set of engine fixes. See Lineage & credits for who built
what. The original GeneralsX README lives on the upstream-main branch.
No game assets are included or distributed. You need your own copy (Steam, ~$5 on sale).
"Porting" undersells how weird this journey was, so here's the honest shape of it. The lineage below built the foundation: EA's source release, the community's modernization, Fighter19's original Unix port, GeneralsX's macOS/Linux work. What did not exist was any of this on iOS — and iOS is a hostile place for a 2003 Windows RTS:
dlopen to the app bundle (Patches/dxvk-ios.patch).→ The war stories: Porting Playbook §8 — the bug archaeology → The complete engineering log: docs/port/PORTING_PLAYBOOK.md → How to do this to another game: docs/port/PORTING_PATTERNS.md
Worth saying plainly: this was a human + AI collaboration. The engineering — the C++, the cross-builds, the device debugging — was done by Claude Code (Anthropic's Claude, Fable model), directed and playtested by a human who described symptoms like "the minimap is black" and "I hear chirping" and owned every decision. Neither half ships this alone: one of us can't write C++, and the other can't hear the chirping.
Prerequisites (one time):
# Toolchain
xcode-select --install
brew install cmake ninja meson pkgconf
brew install --cask steamcmd
# vcpkg (full clone — a shallow clone breaks manifest baselines)
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg ~/vcpkg && ~/vcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
export VCPKG_ROOT=~/vcpkg # add to your shell profile
# LunarG Vulkan SDK (NOT the Homebrew cask) — https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home
export VULKAN_SDK=$HOME/VulkanSDK/<version>/macOS # add to your shell profile
Clone, build, get assets, play:
git clone https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad.git GeneralsX
cd GeneralsX
./scripts/build/macos/build-macos-zh.sh # checks deps, configures, builds
./scripts/build/macos/deploy-macos-zh.sh # creates ~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH + run.sh
./scripts/get-assets.sh <your_steam_username> # fetches game data you own
cd ~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH && ./run.sh -win
On top of the macOS prerequisites: full Xcode (signed into your Apple ID),
brew install xcodegen, and a (free or paid) Apple Developer team.
cd GeneralsX
git submodule update --init references/fbraz3-dxvk # iOS DXVK is built from this + Patches/dxvk-ios.patch
./scripts/build/ios/fetch-moltenvk.sh # pinned MoltenVK.framework (checksummed)
./scripts/build/ios/stage-fonts.sh # Liberation fonts, renamed as the game expects
cmake --preset ios-vulkan
cmake --build build/ios-vulkan --target z_generals
GX_TEAM_ID=<your-team-id> GX_BUNDLE_ID=com.you.generalszh \
./scripts/build/ios/package-ios-zh.sh --install # assembles, signs, installs
Find your team id in Xcode → Settings → Accounts. Assets ship inside the app
bundle (self-contained install); --dev skips the ~2.7 GB copy for fast code
iteration.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
docs/port/PORTING_PLAYBOOK.md |
The complete engineering log of this port: every failure mode, root cause, fix — start with §8, the bug archaeology: the black minimap, the silent EVA lines, and the chirp |
docs/port/PORTING_PATTERNS.md |
Generalized methodology for porting classic Windows games to Apple platforms |
docs/port/RELEASE_CHECKLIST.md |
Gate for public release |
scripts/get-assets.sh |
Steam asset fetcher (your own copy; app 2732960) |
scripts/build/macos/, scripts/build/ios/ |
Build, deploy, packaging pipelines |
ios/ |
XcodeGen signing-stub project + ios/config/ (staged Options.ini, dxvk.conf) |
Patches/dxvk-ios.patch |
DXVK changes the iOS d3d8/d3d9 dylibs are built from (applied via the local-fork build) |
Generals had a chain of giants to stand on. Command & Conquer: Renegade — EA's 2002 FPS from the same GPL source release — has far less: no native macOS or iOS build of the W3D engine has ever shipped (Mac players today go through Wine-based compatibility layers). The OpenW3D community project has real cross-platform groundwork — a DXVK wrapper scaffold and SDL3 build plumbing — with Mac/Linux on its roadmap, and that groundwork is exactly what we built on.
Same methodology as this repo, much deeper water: OpenW3D's Win32 compat scaffold expanded by ~3,000 lines (the engine calls raw Windows APIs for file finding, keyboard state, COM), a case-sensitivity strategy for twenty thousand asset paths, the DXVK/MoltenVK renderer bring-up, the audio/video stack, and FPS touch controls. It's playable today — campaign, cinematics, mission scripts — on a Mac and an iPhone. For scale: this Generals port added ~2,200 lines on top of GeneralsX; Renegade needed ~6,700 on top of the Windows-only source.
Repo drops soon, with the OpenW3D lineage credited the way this repo credits its chain. Same rules: GPL v3, bring your own copy, full engineering log.
This port is the newest link in a long chain, and the earlier links did foundational work that this repo inherits everywhere:
Engine code GPL v3 (EA's source release → the chain above → this fork). Game assets: not included, not licensed here.
The problem is: quickly fixing problems (or preventing problems) benefits from having a good understanding of what the code is doing.
If you do have a suite of automated checks that's comprehensive enough that if it passes, no one will have any problems with the result, I think I'd agree. -- I don't think we're quite there at the point where "programming" is coming up with that suite of automated checks and then just not regarding the source code of the program itself.
Still, it represents a possible way how AI gets rid of team members.
My favourite example of which is Northern Ireland's Orange Order.
The colour is orange, because that was the Royal colour of the family of the monarch it was named after, William of Orange, who was Dutch, titled after the principality of Orange which is named after the city of Orange which is French which got its name from the Celtic word for forehead or temple.
The colour is named after the fruit, the fruit's name is a corruption "a norange" -> "an orange", which goes back to naranja which goes to Arabic which goes to Classical Persian which goes to Sanskrit.
Meanwhile, the dutch word for the fruit is sinaasappel, Chinese apple, compare with the English word "mandarin" used for many different Chinese things.
> "now I have the full picture"
I always interpreted that phrase as a sort of marker to delimit the phase in which it explores the codebase and gathers information from the phase in which it implements the changes.
Not sure if it's still done, but I think some months ago there was discussion that some of the phrases are injected by the inference loop to "steer" the model - e.g. "But wait" if a thought block was too short etc. Obviously such phrases couldn't be influenced by the prompt.
"The evening settled over the city, drawing the light out of the streets one corner at a time. Windows blinked awake with lamplight, and the wind moved through the alleys restlessly, leaves brushing against walls before gathering themselves along the pavement. In the distance, the river kept its steady argument with the stone embankments. When the night pressed in, the weather became increasingly angry, until it was a raging storm."
In the affective sense, evenings don't settle, and street lights are not drawn out, windows don't blink, and wind isn't restless. Weather can neither be angry, nor rage.But such personification is a natural part of how the English speak.
https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewri...
> 13,044 unsafe blocks in the resulting Rust code (hand-written Rust projects of similar size average ~73)
Grok is this true?
I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny.
Hang on. A claim like that can be verified with a single grep! Give me a minute...
$ rg -U "unsafe\s+\{" . | wc -l
10551
Hey, that's progress!And if you manage to do this automatically before committing, you’ve built the backpressure everybody is talking about.
Last I heard Claude Code devs were trying to compare their app to a game engine or rendering system.
This was summarily ridiculed. Are you saying that writing a game engine is easier than writing Claude Code?
Life was different back then. Source control systems were a LOT worse (this is CVS era for open source development). We certainly weren't in the current era where everyone wants to play these old games on their phones now.
What almost certainly happened is all copies of the source were simply lost. They may have sat on someone's hard drive, a team server hard drive, or somewhere else. It's possible they didn't have more than a few copies while development was ongoing.
The high number of unsafe blocks is a good sign.
If I understand what happened here correctly this isn't really a case of any such meme, but the result of the porters (heh) telling the LLM to directly convert zig code using unsafe to match the previous code "exactly".
I.e. more like using the LLM as a fancy version of c2rust [1] (which would result in just as much unsafe) than a result of LLMs reaching for escape hatches too liberally.
But it didn't, thats the whole point. The game in question was updated like a day ago, not 20 years.
Fable added few config files for iOS and a gesture mapping to mouse events. It did not do any of the hard stuff.
The title is so misleading that it is probably the single reason why this made to the front page with people assuming it actually did anything hard here.
If anyone deserves the recognition - its the upstream projects that made the game modern and cross platform in the first place.
EA Games open sourced the original C&C Generals source code a year ago.
GeneralsX is a fork of the original source code. The fork changes the code to be easier to be ported to other platforms, which GeneralsX provides native Linux and macOS builds.
This project adds a iOS target for the GeneralsX project, the iOS port was made using Claude Fable.
It is cool that a LLM was able to create a iOS port? Yes, but saying like if it was something that was hard or that it would take too much time to do before LLMs is a bit disingenuous in my opinion, especially because the GeneralsX had already done the bulk of the effort of making the code portable in the first place, and that there was already a macOS port.
For reference, the iOS port only needed to add 2,179 lines of code on files that already existed on GeneralsX, and that's not excluding comments, which Claude loves to add some LARGE comments, and things that are iOS app specific, like the app's Info.plist.
And probably that should be run in different harness or with custom system prompt? Since they introduce quirks and glitches as well.
(somehow this motivated me to resurrect HN account)
still very cool, and sci fi not long ago
I often tell codex to launch a subagent without prior context to „remove BS phrases and make the prose sound more natural and higher readability“. That‘s usually enough to get better results.