pouët.net

Ah, so you haven't found my easter egg yet... try typing 'square' into Ixalance JS

This was more of a shits and giggles thing; once I had the TBL prods working I was wondering if it would have been feasible for Ixalance to be a 'general' platform for Demos back in 1998, so I took the win32 source from square, and used that to create a .ixa version. I don't have a win98/win2k era machine lying around to test it, but it should work...

As a side observer and big amiga fan, this feels like a different thing. The resolution is wrong and the fps is wrong for starters. Are those ports authorized by the original authors?

the only thing AI is good for... porting Potion intros \o/

It's pixel perfect, validated against uae at 320x180 and Skipp was quite astonished that even the small imperfections are bit perfect. I'll take his endorsement. (Side note: his own youtube capture is 50fps...) Source code and windows (sub 64k) build aren't released yet because Mavey still has to give the goahead on those.

Awesome Gift port! This is a better usecase than "Kill all humans"!

I saw it I saw it. But I thought Square deserved its own page 😀

Welcome to the party BoyC!

Nice work!

What was the starting point? Did you have the original source code? Did you disassemble the whole intro?

Anyways, amazing result.

My working assumption since about a year ago is that there's no such thing as closed source software anymore. One of my benchmarks to test this assumption was to have an llm reverse engineer Gift from scratch. Sol failed on it (the intro ran but with all manners of timing issues and at a 2 mbyte executable size) but Astra made short work of a full decompilation with proper symbolic info and readable cpp in about 12 hours. The result is readable cpp code that on windows builds to a 58k compressed executable (mind you kkrunchy/squishy are waaaaay stronger packers than any compressor on the Amiga)

I'm doing these tests because I'm curious about the state of the art for these systems. One needs to keep up to know what we're up against and I think this milestone has pretty large ramifications.

For the demoscene I think preservation becomes a lot easier, especially because most demos are quite deterministic and any port can be perpixel-validated against the original easily enough. I see this more as a translation/cross compilation usecase of ai that doesn't detract from the original. In this sense, if done well, this isn't a lossy transformation and I prefer a browser version of this form over youtube as I mentioned above.

I'm afraid that for software in general this will have much worse consequences. I wouldn't be surprised if for example gta 6 was ported to the pc way before it's meant to be released. Cracking software or any sort of copy protection will be literal childs play. With my software developer hat on this is scary as hell. I'm flipfloping between utter amazement and sheer panic.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, BoyC.

I agree with what you say about using these new tools in reverse engineering. It looks like a new golden age of cracking is on the horizon. I wonder to what extent open-weight models, like Qwen 3.8 27B, could emulate Astra's feats.

Next up: demos as service.

Nexus 7 ported to the RP2350 (GPT-6): https://github.com/cpldcpu/PicoDemos/tree/master/26_Nexus7

Does that count?

Experimenting with Opus 5.5, it seems to have "solved" demos...

I'm reading the interesting making-of you wrote.

Excellent work, Azure. Hats off to you!

Indeed, local smalltown band should play the international hits on a restaurant terrace for retirees even in the smallest of villages because the authors just can't make it there in person.

So, I think these browser ports are kinda nice because you get to see classic demoscene productions in your browser with a single click. Cool!

However, what's the point of having your AI spit out a 55.5k "making of"? If you're not really spending any effort to write something, why would I have to spend any effort reading it?

It would seem to me the point is to keep feeding the fascist machine. Which makes a hamberder happy.

a agents.md should be the making of!

So what, you want to have your cake AND eat it?

NO no no no.
if you want your old demos in the browser at the speed of AI, you WILL also have Azure psychosis-induced projects. You won't wiggle your ass out of it, I'll make you eat this shit myself.

There is a load of documentation, most of this was generated by the subagents that reverse engineered Nexus 7 and summarized their findings for the reimplemtation. Probably its also possible to generate a web port from those folders.



I guess this is sarcasm? :9 In any case, I asume that none of the demoports in this thread are human made.

you are absolutely right

Watching these web ports is like watching your childhood favorite show and realizing that they're just shit (not the demos themselves). And it would be an absolute thrill to read the original Nexus 7 source code to figure out how it works but this feels like unseasoned food or lukewarm coffee.

It's weird how such amazing technology can ruin so much.

We all wish it was. But nah. I bet you didn't count on anyone to pretend to be reading that.

It's for me, because I rather read that than 100s of .md files and other files created by the subagents. The full project folder has more then 6500 artifacts (800mb) created from reverse engineering, its not commited to the repo.

The ability to read quickly seems to be an important trait in the world to come.



Agreed.

Interesting thought although I do feel more like this is more akin to offline translation as opposed to what emulators/dosbox/etc do which is basically online translation. Curious: how would you feel about the same result (one click on a link to watch an old release in a browser) if it was done with an emulator running in a browser? (Random example although a game)

Personally I don't see much of a difference except that a direct port runs better. And both are better than any youtube capture.