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Civ 1 period accurate decompilation

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I've used LLMs to decompile Civ 1 and put the reconstructed C source on GitHub, along with a technical book and story.The reconstructed source builds with what i'm pretty sure is the original Microsoft C compiler and toolchain. It produces a byte-for-byte match with the original executable, aside from a four-byte correction for what appears to be a patch applied after linking. So it should be pretty close to how the original game was made; although it can't be said that this is the "original source code".I've also used that source to create a modern build of the game, in the `reciv` repository.Like most people, I'm in two minds about the benefits and downsides of LLMs. This work also builds on OpenCiv1, which probably deserves most of the credit - not only did I direct the LLM to use that work; but it was almost certainly in the training data.Qualms aside - I couldn't resist having a look inside one of my all-time favourite games. There's a few attempts at Civ 1 including recent LLM ones. But i'm not aware of any that publicise the resulting source code.

HN · launched Oct 20, 2026 · 10 upvotes (top 47%) · 1 view

Niche: game decompilation and recompilation tools · 196 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▼ -38% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial The LLM-assisted reverse engineering has already been done and the repo is public, but reproducing a byte-exact decompilation of a 16-bit DOS binary against a period Microsoft toolchain needs assembly and compiler-matching expertise that a vibe-coder would struggle to supply.

What it would actually take: Start with a disassembler such as Ghidra or IDA plus the original executable, then iteratively reconstruct C source and build it with a matching MS C compiler until the output is byte-identical. The hard parts are x86 real-mode reverse engineering, matching compiler code generation, and documenting the original game's data structures. This needs a reverse engineer who knows 16-bit DOS internals and old compiler behavior, with LLMs accelerating the grunt work.

Discussion

5 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Legal risks of decompiling/recreating games, Source is only an LLM guess at the original

Feature requests: Apply approach to other games and programs

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 154 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #89 of 155 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 354 days after the earliest competitor.

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