Reviving a 20-year-old puzzle game Chromatron with Ghidra and AI
Hello HN, I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently. I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying. I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single…
Reviving a 20-year-old puzzle game Chromatron with Ghidra and AI launched on March 7, 2026 with 28 votes, #793 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Chromatron is a revived version of a 20-year-old puzzle game where players manipulate light and color beams to solve challenges. The creator reverse-engineered the original game using Ghidra and AI to reconstruct the lost source code and recreate it as a playable web version. The project is presented as educational, demonstrating how to recover and modernize abandoned software.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Decompiling the classic laser puzzle game Chromatron from Windows XP and PowerPC executables into Rust. A pixel-perfect port using Claude Code, Opus 4.6, Cursor, GPT-5.2-Codex, and Ghidra.
I recompiled an old game from Windows XP and PowerPC binaries to Apple Silicon and Wasm. And you can too! A colleague used Ghidra to add infinite lives in River Raid , a classic Atari game. I got inspired to give this open-source decompiler by the NSA a try. Flipping one assembly instruction is one thing. But recovering an entire game is another. I wanted to start with something small, so there would be a reasonable chance that it would work. I went with Chromatron by Sean Barrett (Silver Spaceship Software) - a puzzle game about mirrors and lasers. I like its simplicity. No story, just puzzles. And it gets challenging fast! A game that I played when doing an internship in quantum optics,…from quesma.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Play: https://p.migdal.pl/chromatron-oxide/ Repo: https://github.com/stared/chromatron-oxide/ (educational purpose only) The original: https://www.silverspaceship.com/chromatron/ Full story in the blog post.
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