Funny. I had claude recreate Thrust based on wiki article alone - and it nailed it. I then spent a week trying to implement a perfect autopilot for it. And then a solveable level generator. I have this running as a screen saver in one of my apps.
> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly.
Why would AI say that, when nearly every piece of training data is ever been fed use milliseconds? I think much more likely that this is how the author thinks of it.
3 hundreds of a second == 33 Hz is very clean in my human brain.
I was about to complain at you for jumping to conclusions, but your cited example contains two emdashes and a nested "it's not X it's Y". It certainly looks like slop. In my own writing I'm increasingly conscious of trying to avoid the appearance of slop, I would like to think I would have caught this.
Hmm - the article isn't dated and it doesn't mention which models were used for the initial slop version. The initial commit in the git repo is from Feb 15, 2026.
I wonder how the initial pass would fare now with Fable 5 or 5.6 Sol?
I think it was Opus but can't remember the version. Would have been whatever was available in Claude Code in February.
Managed to find some screenshots. It did work but gravity wasn't really gravity - things fell at a constant rate. Turrets were floating in mid-air. It was missing the shields and you couldn't pick up the ball from the pedestal.
I've been saying for months that any time you say something about the capabilities of the AI tooling you should say what exact model, agent, and effort level you're using. Because I've taken a few of those "AI can't do X" and had AI do a fine job at them.
Complaining about slop with slop.
3 centiseconds instead of 30 miliseconds, totally not a robot
3 hundreds of a second == 33 Hz is very clean in my human brain.
I wonder how the initial pass would fare now with Fable 5 or 5.6 Sol?
Managed to find some screenshots. It did work but gravity wasn't really gravity - things fell at a constant rate. Turrets were floating in mid-air. It was missing the shields and you couldn't pick up the ball from the pedestal.
https://www.jamesdrandall.com/old-thrust/1.png
https://www.jamesdrandall.com/old-thrust/2.png
https://www.jamesdrandall.com/old-thrust/3.png
I have Sol 5.6 ultra working on Thrust right now.
https://kemendo.com/thrust-one-shot.html
Notably while the game "works" it's not even close to an a "reproduction" as far as I can tell - moreso an interpretation.
This has one level that doesn't level increment, none of the adversarial sprites are correct and the color and iconography are incorrect.
Granted I didn't give it much to work with but I figured I'd see what happens. As far as one shots go, I've seen worse.
I used commodity GPT 5.6 HIGH on firefox via chat interface
https://www.jamesdrandall.com/old-thrust/1.png https://www.jamesdrandall.com/old-thrust/2.png https://www.jamesdrandall.com/old-thrust/3.png