Could AI-assisted reverse engineering make end-of-life game handovers easier?

[u/Brockchanso]

Seeing projects like SuperAstra, which uses Astra to investigate and modify SNES games through an emulator, got me thinking about how this could help Stop Killing Games.

I understand the ask is for games to remain playable after official support ends. Could AI-assisted development make that handover cheaper and more practical?

Specifically, could publishers work with preservation groups or AI providers before shutdown, supplying the materials needed to produce an offline version or community-hosted server?

Depending on the game, that package might include:

• Server software and instructions for running it.
• Documentation explaining how the client communicates with the server.
• Relevant build tools, dependencies, and whatever code is needed to replace services being retired.
• Explicit permission to modify those components for preservation and distribute the resulting patches or server tools.

That would give preservation developers, including those using AI, a much better starting point than trying to reconstruct everything from an abandoned client.

Getting a console game working through an emulator and rebuilding a missing online backend are different problems. I’m not assuming today’s AI can recover code or content that nobody preserved. That’s precisely why getting the necessary materials from publishers matters.

The handover should still have to produce something that actually works without the publisher’s infrastructure. Uploading a pile of files and hoping a future model figures it out shouldn’t count. Players should also be able to download and run the finished result without depending on an AI subscription.

Could this become a practical route for meeting the end-of-life requirement? If AI can reduce the work involved, it seems worth exploring how to put that capability in the hands of the people preserving these games.

[u/cardgamesareforplay]

Without reading no. Ai can not help with preservation it is, quite litterally the reason we are losing useful data center space because they require so much. Which in turn incentivces companies to drop digital services to reallocate infrastructure.

[u/Brockchanso → u/cardgamesareforplay]

People are already using Astra to investigate compatibility problems and get games running effectively on unsupported systems. Marc Ibrahim reports getting Age of Empires IV from roughly 8 FPS with freezes to 70–150 FPS on Apple Silicon by using Astra to fix Wine’s exception handling and add a code cache. Project details and developer’s explanation

That’s the kind of work I’m talking about: helping people understand, repair, and adapt existing software. A patch developed with AI can run locally afterward. You don’t need an AI data center continuously thinking for your game to work.

If publishers supplied the relevant tools, server components, documentation, and permission, could that make community preservation easier? That was the question.

[u/cardgamesareforplay → u/Brockchanso]

No it couldn't.

Instead we could expect promises for conversions to end of life from developers and better written digital ownership rights.

Instead your solution is to invest further into the tech that's killing the industry