Claude Opus 5.5 Decompiles Halo and GTA into Flawless Browser Ports
Vibe coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work well
Claude Opus 5.5 can decompile games overnight, and the results are playable in a browser tab. I tried several ports—Halo: CE, The Simpsons: Hit and Run, GTA: Vice City—and some ran flawlessly, even hitting 240fps with working online servers. Publishers can send cease-and-desist letters, but re-creating these ports is trivial. This is IP whack-a-mole at a scale unseen since pirated DVDs.
I genuinely don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle on something like this.
- sobiolite
I don't really understand the IP protection angle here: These browser ports are no more or less illegal that hosting a RAM file for use on an emulator, or pirated software in general. And sites hosting them are no harder or easier to shut down than existing piracy sites.
What's more interesting is the new ability to easily create ports of old games that let you play old games legally: Bringing your copy of the original's data files and playing on a modernised engine with high-resolution, unlocked FPS, bugfixes, etc. In the past couple of months, I've seen a bunch of vibe-coded ports of DOS games for which the source code was lost.
- cjstewart88
My heads exploding. I expected to try Quake and just run through the first level and maybe stop. Being dropped into a multiplayer game and it feeling as good as it did was a jaw dropping moment for me. Quake 3, same experience... my ping wasn't great.
I don't know where my quake cds are. Even if I found them I'd have to figure out what mods to run to have it feel good. Then I'd have to find communities to play with.
This is super cool to me.
- user43928
I wonder if Rockstar will release GTA VI on PC a year after the console again.
If they wait too long, perhaps the community will produce a better port before them.
- moritzwarhier
Reminds me of my recent vibe coding project of porting Winamp AVS to web using Emscripten. It worked so well that it was simply.. done after a few sessions, and I was amazed and also feeling fuzzy in the head.
One turn involved ChatGPT explicitly fixing C++ source code to fix beat detection for the available audio sources after I complained that it was broken.
Hands down, sure, the most respectable work, apart from the original AVS code, was done by the Emscripten contributors. Anyway, it readjusted my expectations, even after my day job switched to agentic coding as the primary development tool.
- littlecranky67
Honest question: Anybody has more details how to do this? I.e. I have my favorite game from the DOS/Win95 era I want to port plus a dev background - how to get started with AI reverse engineering?