#civilization

2026-10-21 Show HN: Civ 1 period accurate decompilation unrated 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.

2026-08-30 Show HN: HTML5 port of Civilization 2: MGE unrated One of the first projects I worked on using Claude and Opus 4.6 was a port of Civ 2 (which to me is the definitive Civ game) to HTML, as I didn't want to keep installing a Windows XP VM to play it, or patching it. It's been a long road, but the first beta is now out on Github and available on the web at the link above. Includes original graphics, units, the same UI, and even the videos from Heralds. Noting the assets are still copyrighted you are mandated to have a licenced copy of the game to play before you go forward. Source code here using BSD 3.0 https://github.com/wan0net/civ2