March 8, 2026
Laser drama, code karma
Show HN: Reviving a 20-year-old puzzle game Chromatron with Ghidra and AI
Fans cheer, skeptics roast, and someone found the source
TLDR: A developer used Ghidra and AI to bring Chromatron, a 2000s laser puzzle, to modern devices, but commenters split—some applauded the grit while others noted the source code was already online and argued AI still needs heavy human guidance. It matters as a snapshot of AI hype colliding with retro game preservation.
A retro laser puzzler is back from the grave—and the comments are absolute fireworks. Developer Piotr Migdał used NSA’s open-source tool Ghidra and chatty AI assistants to revive the 20-year-old game Chromatron for modern Macs and the web. He even admits he once thought the hex tool “xxd” was a smiley face, which had the crowd grinning. But the feel-good vibes took a sharp turn when a veteran commenter swooped in to say the game’s source code had already been posted on a forum—and dropped a link. Cue record scratch.
That reveal lit up the thread: was this a heroic rescue mission or a vibe-driven detour? Meanwhile, the AI debate went nuclear. One camp cheered the craft and patience. Another camp rolled their eyes at the “AI did it” framing, pointing out the author had to babysit the model as it hallucinated fonts and invented UI bits. A spicy voice declared Google will “leapfrog” Claude and that these tools can’t do it without a human anyway. Elsewhere, someone linked a SkyRoads revival, turning the comments into a full retro-renaissance showcase. Love it or side-eye it, the community made one thing clear: lasers are cool, but receipts are cooler.
Key Points
- •The author recompiled Chromatron from Windows XP and PowerPC binaries to Apple Silicon and WebAssembly.
- •Ghidra was the primary reverse engineering tool, supplemented by Claude Code (Opus 4.5) and the GhidrAssistMCP plugin.
- •Initial AI-assisted reconstruction required extensive manual guidance and asset decoding, with issues like hallucinated UI details.
- •Core mechanics (e.g., laser beams) were rebuilt incrementally through iterative refinements.
- •A second approach used m2c to translate PowerPC machine code into C to improve the rebuild process.