Reverse engineer an old game so it runs on modern hardware and can be studied headlessly

Replying on Hacker News to a claim that language models are bad at games, the commenter TeMPOraL described reviving a 1997 PC game from his childhood with Claude Code. Within roughly 30 minutes the game worked on current hardware, and the agent had built itself a simple reverse engineering setup in the process. Over later sessions it decompiled most of the game, and when its on screen play kept taking over his PC, it changed a shimmed DirectX DLL so the game could run headlessly on a Windows private desktop, so several copies could run in parallel. It mapped memory addresses and game scripts and built helper tools so he could check its work. It now writes full level guides with screenshots of key moments.