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Show HN: Black Ops II statically recompiled to native ARM64 macOS
148 points65 comments1.7 average comments/hourSubmitted by adrbn
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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 :)
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I've used to same technique to get Fallout: New Vegas running on Asahi Linux on MacOS. Its quite a step, but https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk makes it possible to skip a lot of work and get the game running in day. You can then make any changes you want, so I'm running fallout nv on a wide display in native resolution and some graphical improvements. Realtime whole world shadow maps, SSAO, tonemap + color grading, FXAA and Hor+ FOV. 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.
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesStuff like this makes me really happy about AI. The convenience that AAA lacks, or that they intentionally withhold, is now within reach.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies> does not use any emulator whatsoever, be it Wine, Crossover or Rosetta Not sure about the other two, but WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's in the name :)
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesSomewhat related: https://lwss.github.io/Kisak-Black/
Comment on Hacker NewsTwo of the best games of all time waverace 64 and 1080 snowboarding for the n64 have been statically recomped. I've been playing them on my steamdeck. Unfortunately I think the party will end soon as anthropic are already preventing reimplementing games in there system prompts.
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesHow does it actually recompile, does it use an existing tool? I can’t imagine the agent combs through every routine and hand translates the assembly.
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesThis is impressive. Besides personal use gaming, it has a lot of interesting opportunities... Elsewhere OP said it was 4 months of Claude, which is very fas for something this complicated.
Comment on Hacker Newswhat was your workflow for creating this? there's now extra guardrails around decompiling / reverse engineering, do you think this is still possible to do or were you just lucky enough to do it before the guardrails?
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesi want someone to make a co op mod for cod 4 :C
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