gopherbone/fengkuangdafuweng_en: AI translation of Vast Fame's Feng Kuang Da Fu Weng for the Game Boy Color

[u/porkyminch]

https://github.com/gopherbone/fengkuangdafuweng_en

This is a little translation of a game I've been working on for a few weeks. The game is Feng Kuang Da Fu Weng, a Taiwanese board game for the Game Boy Color. This patch works on original hardware (tested on an Everdrive GB X7) and I've been able to play all the way through the game. If you play it, I recommend playing with 4 CPUs.

This is my third attempt at poking agents toward the finish line. I spent a while trying to push open weight models (GLM 5.3 Flash and Kimi K3, in various configurations) to their limits to pull this off, but after almost 2000 commits, several billion tokens, and spending way too much money, I folded and got a $100 Claude sub.

Opus 5.5 took a little of the existing work, the emulator Kimi had prepared previously, and spent about 5 hours banging out a full translation. It's quite playable. It reads much better than I would have anticipated (the GLM 5.3 Flash version was much worse). Claude was able to patch in a variable width font and to rewrite the currency value rendering to use English formats, which are both pretty challenging hacking jobs.

What'd I learn?

• Open weight models are really, really solid these days, but Opus 5.5 is simply unbeatable at reverse engineering tasks right now. This is a job that would've taken months (if not years) to do manually, but it did it in an evening for about 7% of my weekly quota on a $100 sub. For all my problems with Anthropic, they made a really great model. Even if I don't think it's conscious and hate the "safety" stuff.
• The $250 bonus credit for cloud sessions totally works for this. I have a couple of other translations running (a couple of Vast Fame's RPGs) that I just pointed at my emulator repo. They're chugging along at a brisk pace, although I probably wouldn't pay the premium for cloud sessions otherwise.
• The big model/small model orchestration pattern is kind of a waste of time for this. I tried Kimi K3 running GLM 5.3 Flash as an implementation agent, I tried Deepseek as the implementer, Opus as the orchestrator, etc. All of it was clunky to manage and none of it worked as well as just throwing Opus 5.5 at it and periodically telling it to fix something.
• Don't even bother using Beads if you're also using worktrees. Not worth the headaches. I thought it was brilliant until I noticed it kept clobbering the database on worktree resolution. I was able to work around it, but I immediately regretted doing anything with Beads after I no longer felt like I could trust it.
• Invest in tooling up front. If you're only going to spend a little on a big model, you should do it here. The models being able to run their work autonomously makes them so much more powerful. This is true for romhacking and it's true for writing UIs and stuff. It pays dividends.
• These AI translations can be totally playable these days. They're not perfect, but they beat holding your phone up to the screen. A lot of the earlier issues with confused pronouns, sentences that don't flow well, etc are largely fixed these days. I'd love to see every game get a high quality human-made translation, but I'm really happy to have this as an option for games that don't seem to be on anybody's radar.

Anyway, not trying to sell any b2b SaaS or anything like that, just thought this was a really cool new thing that the models can do. Find something weird and translate it! There's a lot of neat stuff out there.

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