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Software & DevOpsAny

Recompile a 1991 assembly PC game with Claude Code

The author uses Claude Code CLI with Sonnet to get the source of their 1991 386+ assembly game compiling again.

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Use case overview

The author uses Claude Code CLI with Sonnet to get the source of their 1991 386+ assembly game compiling again.

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Reported experience

  1. What they did

    The author took the full source of an unpublished 1991 386+ assembly game and set up UASM, which is MASM-compatible, with DOSBox for running results. Using Claude Code CLI with Sonnet, they got the old build utilities compiling. They also asked the model to locate bugs mentioned in their own old code comments.

  2. How it went

    The picture converters and sprite extractor now compile and run in DOSBox, but the main game doesn't compile yet; the author expects a few more hours. Sonnet 4.6 immediately spotted a clash with a reserved name, incbin.

  3. Worth knowing

    Old macro names may now be reserved words in modern assemblers; here a macro called incbin blocked UASM compilation until the model pointed it out.

Example prompts

Try with Claude Code
I have the source code of an old [language, e.g. 386 assembly] project at [path to folder] that I last built in [year]. Work out which assembler, linker and tools it needs, set up a way to build it on my [OS], and fix errors until it compiles and runs. Explain each change you make, and ask me before you delete or overwrite any original files.

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