Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia
21 hours ago
- The author conducted an experiment to port Prince of Persia from Apple II 6502 assembly to C# using various AI models over multiple rounds.
- Early AI models (Opus 4.6, Codex) produced non-functional or incorrect game engines due to wrong architecture.
- Opus 5 introduced tools to compare against the original DOS game, diagnosed architecture issues, and rebuilt the engine with real animation data.
- Opus 5.5 from a single prompt ported the room-drawing routine from SDLPoP, achieving pixel-perfect levels by verifying against the original game.
- Key improvements came from giving AI access to reference implementations (SDLPoP) and ability to test against the actual game.
- The project is open-source under GPLv3 and credits Jordan Mechner, SDLPoP community, and Fabien Sanglard.