tevlon clarifies the AI-assisted build process and timeline
5 Nov 1 4:18 AM · 10d ago · 4 comments · 1 source · development 5 of 5
Responding to questions, tevlon explains the original disassembly predates usable LLMs (earliest commits from 2023) and that the C-port verification relied on a Mesen telemetry harness checked against Claude Opus 5.5, while crediting vermiceli for the base disassembly work.
“Then, i spent some time in building a harness and collect telemetry data in Mesen. Once, i had that: i just played the game in the emulator and asked Claude Opus 5.5 to use this as verification.”
tevlontevlon Developer who built the WebAssembly Contra portvermiceli Original author of the annotated Contra disassembly
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Nice! Can you speak to your process? How much structure did you give the agent? Did you have to "discover" the right way to do the port? Perhaps you just asked Claude, and then iterated? How do you feel about the final architecture/layout of the code, and would you approach a similar project in a new way given what you've learned?You said in…
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Wow, the source 6502 assembly with comments is incredible: https://github.com/vermiceli/nes-contra-us/blob/main/src/ban...The whole thing (all banks) is more than 10,000 lines of assembly code. When I wrote assembly code for a university computer science course, it was hard to manage even 200 lines. I cannot imagine writing and managing 10,000…
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As much as I wouldn't want to write that much assembly, you make it less daunting the same way that you would with any other programming language. There are simple idioms for loops that you can macro-ize; similarly for function setup and teardown; more importantly, the concept of a function still exists at that level.
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Bear in mind: the dissambly was done pre-LLMs. The early commits are from 2023. Although, ChatGPT 4 existed then, it was not capable of doing these things.Impressive work, indeed. vermiceli the GOAT.
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> I ported it in two stepsYou didn't port it at all. You had Claude do it for you.
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