UIUC 2002 – we wrote a space shooter in x86 asm. In 2026 Claude resurrected it
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2 hours ago
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gottebp
2 hours ago
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Nostalgia and Claude Code makes some interesting hard things possible. Five of us wrote this as our ECE291 final project at UIUC in the summer of 2002. It's a Middle Earth space shooter in pure x86 assembly, fully software rendered. It has hand-tuned SSE memory ops, Mersenne Twister RNG, toroidal physics, 10,000 particles at 60fps. We were pretty rough after those two weeks and probably didn't smell great either.

The code sat on a CD-ROM for 24 years. I had Claude Code burn a bunch of tokens to port it from x86 asm to C to WebAssembly (via Emscripten), wrapped it in tests, and got it running cross-platform in the browser/mobile/desktop/everywhere. It's 98% faithful to the original, however I did tune the difficulty a bit; and by that I mean best of luck!

Playable Link: https://particlefield.com/projects/alan-parsons/game.html

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