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Beer Manager rebuilt for the browser from its old DOS executable
Christoph Janz used Claude to reverse engineer his 1997 brewery-management game after losing the source code, then rebuild it for a desktop browser.
Credits
- Build author Christoph Janz Source ↗
- HN submitter chrija Source ↗
Earliest dated source: Details reviewed:
The full story
Christoph Janz and Christopher Münchhoff originally wrote Beer Manager for MS-DOS. With the source code gone, Janz asked Claude to reconstruct the game from its 1997 executable. The work used Ghidra decompilation and emulation to derive a specification before building a browser version.
Janz reports about 34 hours of Claude working time across six days. The write-up describes tests comparing simulation state and rendered frames with the original. The released version targets a desktop browser and mouse; multiplayer and graphical improvements are future plans.
Before and after
- Starting problem
- The source code for the original DOS game was lost.
- Reported result
- A browser version reconstructed from the executable, with comparison tests described by the author.
Device and compatibility
- Desktop computer · Modern desktop browser
The author specifies a mouse; the release reproduces the original game rather than adding multiplayer.
Source ↗
What Claude did
- Decompiled and analysed the executable, reconstructed behaviour, implemented the browser version and comparison tests.Claude Code · Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 Source ↗
How it was done
Tools
Themes
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Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.