I've been thinking about this topic and am glad to see it come up: AI is going to be a huge boon for digital preservation & restoration projects like this. I realized this while building this project (a map explorer for Tribes 2): https://exogen.github.io/t2-mapper/

Old games like this have a small (and shrinking) audience of people who care about them. With Tribes 2, for example, there are only ~50 people who actively play on a regular basis. A subset of those people are programmers, and a subset of those have the time & energy to put into a project like t2-mapper, assuming they're even interested. I got a basic version working, but then Claude Code helped decode and convert obsolete Dynamix/Torque3D file formats (improving existing Blender addons that were incomplete), got TorqueScript running in the browser, wrote shaders, and generally helped figure out what the original C++ code was doing.

In the past, you'd need the stars to perfectly align for stuff like this to happen: a passionate super-fan with the time, resources, knowledge, and persistence to see it through. Now, you mostly just need the persistence (and maybe a couple hundred bucks for tokens). I foresee people with niche interests (but not necessarily a programmer's skillset) being able to extend the lifetime (and maybe audience) of their obscure or obsolete software.

Wow, this whole thread has been a blast from the past. But this tribes mapper is beaming me back to my childhood. Seeing the actual siege base layouts, wow. I can still see myself as a little kid, not fully understanding or being good at the shooting part of tribes. I just stayed in base, repairing the generators. Sometimes enemies would run in, i would hide, and shoot from a distance and call for help. Them some heavyweight, powerarmoered up, armed to the teeth teammate would come down from the skies with his jetpack, carrying crazy armaments like heavy spinfusors, plasma cannons, artillery. The queiet generator complex would soon erupt in a burst of violence, this iron hulk would clear out the intruders, thank me for the heads up and leave. Then i would get back to the repairs! Now my friends, that kind of emergent gameplay, is hard to come by!

This is great. I'd love to do something similar for Ground Control (2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Control_(video_game)).

Do you have a writeup of how you did it? Both (regular) tooling (radare2? rizin? IDA? ...) and how the LLM did (or did not) use it?

In the little spare time I have, I've been able to reverse engineer the "compressed" file format (ended up being basically a XOR'ed zlib-compressed TAR-like archive), but not much else. I have not used LLMs to help me.