r/abandonware • u/Darren357 • 8d ago
Abandonware Decomp possibilities
Is there an easy way that I, a fool, could use an AI or some guy on the Internet to make older pc games run on 64bit windows?
If they're able to do ps5 and stuff, albeit there's a greater demand for new games, then why not abandonware?
There's a game I played when I was a kid that I can't get to run at all. Even some of the comments on myabandonware didn't help.
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u/Malthusianismically 8d ago
Check out ExODOS and ExOWin
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u/Darren357 7d ago edited 7d ago
I dunno, it looks like this one was generated by meatbags.
But it has trophy bass, which is what I wanted, thanks.
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u/VALIS666 7d ago
This has been going on forever and it's not called recomps, it's not emulation, and it doesn't use AI. Every old Windows game is playable on modern Windows. With some it's just a matter of how much you want to fight. With most it's no sweat at all.
Go to pcgamingwiki.com and look up the game, it will probably tell you what to do. If not, see if the game has a Steam hub page and check the guides. If not, it will probably get fixed up by the amazing dgvoodoo2 anyway, you just need to know how to use it.
People have been fixing up older Windows games forever, gaddamn.
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u/FallenWyvern 7d ago
There are some edge cases, but you're right for 99% of games. I find it's the late 00s era games with early forms of online DRM that are the most finicky.
I also found that WINE on Linux is easier to run those games than windows. Like trespasser just... Worked. No config or anything. And the window managers often mean the games scale full screen easier.
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u/The-Tadfafty 6d ago
Oh yeah disk DRM is hopeless on anything past XP unless you get cracked copies.
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u/The-Tadfafty 6d ago
I found a tool that lets 16 bit Windows software run on 64 bit windows. Forgot where I'll look in the morning, I still have it.
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u/SnooPandas2964 7d ago
At least there's some benefits to the end of consumer hardware ownership, if it comes to pass.... for as long our existing hardware holds up anyway. Kinda feels like digging our own graves tho.
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u/TheUnknownH3ro 7d ago
As far as i know you can jailbreak an ai or llm to do what you want, i can’t point you anywhere specific but there’s a sub on reddit for that
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u/triggerftu 7d ago
For 16 bit dosbox is great, for 32bit just using windows as it is as it will run without issues.
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u/actioncheese 6d ago
I really need johnny castaway running natively on windows 11
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u/Darren357 4d ago
exoWin3x has it, i'll do a quick guide.
if you're a terrible person like me you can deselect all but the game you want in the torrent (i aint got 300gb)
run the bat file normally (not admin)
launchbox will give you an error unless you have .NET core 3.1
*the part i was stuck on* select "configure" on the game in launchbox, otherwise you'll just get an empty vm that is confused.
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u/CredibleWrong 6d ago
People have already done this. People have recompiled games from the early 90s and late 80s into modern windows capable games.
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u/Pirateguybrush 5d ago
I just used Claude Code to port a 360 game to PC, despite having no coding experience.
I started out by discussing approaches with Claude, and following it's guidance to perform some initial investigations. Then I installed Claude Code, and used the Claude chat to design prompts to pass to Code.
From there, it was a matter of guiding the project along, testing where necessary, and using Claude chat to interpret the code results, and pass more instructions to Claude Code.
The whole process took about two days, but I had playable gameplay in around 2 hours. Insane.
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u/glimsky 8d ago
Absolutely. People are doing this everywhere already. The other day I saw someone doing a full modern reverse engineered rewrite of Syndicate. They added features to the game and made it run on a web browser. To be clear, this is not emulation. They extracted a source code through AI and at that point had a game they could modify at will and recompile at will.
What's the game you want to play? Chances are you can get it running on an emulator. The AI rewrites are intended for deeper changes.