@zafinnbooks Claude has basically come at the right time … I don’t have time to do things the old fashioned way any more!

@Neutral_Larry As far as I know, Claude is using the MAME source in conjunction with the arcade rom as the basis for this conversion.

I have no plans to go as detailed as you describe in terms of diffing speed/position per frame but I think I’ll instinctively know when it’s right!

@caviar44 Yes, almost certainly.

(Note that the Pole Position conversion I wrote 10 years ago without AI is already publicly available…)

@scratchedpaint Go on .... what's "the move"? I thought I was a Pole Position enthusiast but obviously not!

@DanRamo07555230 It's taken quite a lot of iterations to get to this point - the car was facing the wrong way in the initial build!

The biggest visual differences between this and my earlier effort are the screen resolution - this one runs in 320x224 and uses overscan.

@ScottElkington There's a good reason ZZKJ didn't attempt the screen rotation for the ST version. 😆

@BreakThymes There's some interesting things going in the 32X scene for sure ... I'm watching it closely!

@ScottElkington The arcade version or the STE version? I can just imagine a data centre somewhere going up in flames if I tried the former. 😄

@rtappmeyer Yeah, we're definitely entering a new golden age of authentic arcade ports on old machines! I dare say it'll cause many people to have a think about what these crusty old machines are capable of.

@RetroNerdGuy I'm doing a lot of porting experiments out of curiosity but don't expect to finish most of them.

Pole Position is an exception because it's an AI rewrite of something I did manually first time round.

@Zer0zEr0ZeR0 At the moment I think it's reasonably easy to tell the difference between "one-shotted" work, and work that's been heavily refined by human hands following the initial iteration.

I think there'll be some really cool stuff coming up once the "one-shotting" novelty wears off.

@htx80nerd Thanks!

@fizzychicken It's an interesting comparison because first time found I reversed the original arcade code into C which went through GCC for use in the STE version.

Claude is transcoding the Z8002 directly into 68k, and doing a fine job.

It's also written some self-modifying 68k for me. 🤯

@indyjonas For the Turbo Cup enhancements, I did point it to the Faster repo for my own amusement, and it embarrased me somewhat by locating and converting a complex and flaky 1000 line PHP sprite generator into 68k.

I now know who the boss is. 😀

@zafinnbooks I daren't look at the code because it's probably better than most things I'd ever write. 😆

But on a serious note, when working professionally I feel compelled to inspect everything that AI does, but with this kind of thing. Ilke to just let it rip and not worry too much.

@indyjonas Not quite one-shotting, but surprisingly close in a lot of cases!

This Pole Position conversion has taken quite a lot of prompting and refinement, but I am trying to tailor it quite closely to the STE hardware rather than just creating something portable and generic.

@zafinnbooks The interesting thing is that I don't even look at the code - the iteration loop is that Claude gives me a disk image, I play it, and give feedback.

Claude's version is more visually correct/advanced but it doesn't "feel" quite as right as my version (yet). Hard to describe. 😀

In 2014, I converted Pole Position to Atari STE the oldskool way, painstakingly disassembling the arcade code and rebuilding in C and assembly.

In 2026, I'm converting Pole Position to Atari STE using Claude to see how it compares.

Weekly tokens are exhausted but here's a WIP!

@dad_prg Tell me about it. 🤯

@dad_prg These are the first two prompts that resulted in the creation of the first disk image with a runnable STE version of Indy. 😀

I'm seeing questions from people asking "How do I prompt AI to port or enhance an existing game", and wondering if my particular AI has superpowers. 😆