Director (and Lingo) is how I got started before moving to Flash and ActionScript for ad agency projects. Was such a fun time to be a developer - you could build whatever you wanted online and brands were being pretty adventurous.
For sure. It’s coincidence, but a couple weeks back I had a frontier LLM decode one of those old Director games and port it to run in a web browser. Took about 2 hours. (it did re-use existing OSS libraries): https://github.com/foxtacles/findus3
(this even happens to be part of the game series the author is talking about in the blog post)
I’ve been decompiling and reversing games for over a decade before LLMs came into the picture. The most recent models are incredibly powerful. Basically no reason left to do any manual reversing anymore (if you only care about the end result)
Director (and Lingo) is how I got started before moving to Flash and ActionScript for ad agency projects. Was such a fun time to be a developer - you could build whatever you wanted online and brands were being pretty adventurous.
I really liked Director. In the 90s I made a significant part of my living with Director projects.
Same here, especially telco interactive CD-ROMs. Type of work that always was abundant for some reason or the other.
I read this as Getting Old - Macromedia Director Games to run on modern hardware
Are todays LLM not capable of translating that stuff into modern JS&Co?
For sure. It’s coincidence, but a couple weeks back I had a frontier LLM decode one of those old Director games and port it to run in a web browser. Took about 2 hours. (it did re-use existing OSS libraries): https://github.com/foxtacles/findus3 (this even happens to be part of the game series the author is talking about in the blog post)
I’ve been decompiling and reversing games for over a decade before LLMs came into the picture. The most recent models are incredibly powerful. Basically no reason left to do any manual reversing anymore (if you only care about the end result)
If the LLM can’t run the original code, it can’t compare to verify the translation is accurate
LLMs are surprising good at looking at plain old hex of a binary and rewriting it as source code that functions similarly.
I'm sure for these older games they'd succeed most of the time.
When the runtime is completely different, I'd also argue it's emulation more than translation? Anyway. Lost in translation I guess.
The scummvm project has been working on porting most of the director games onto it. You can track its current status here:
https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Director/Games?hl=es-ES