What was done
Byron Cohea is reverse engineering the PlayStation game Armored Core with Claude: file formats, the mission pipeline, the script VM and text system, plus a Farsi localization patch built on them.
AC1_RE is a reverse engineering reference and toolkit for Armored Core (PS1, 1997, North American release SLUS-01323). It documents the game's file formats and engine systems and includes behavioural C models of its subsystems. Byron Cohea's commits are co-authored by Claude Fable 5.1.
How it was done
The work uses a headless Ghidra pipeline with Java and Jython scripts for overlay import and decompilation, plus emulator automation. Write-ups cover the .T container format and its checksum, the mission to geometry loading pipeline, the PA geometry format, the mission system and its script VM, combat physics, the entity AI framework and the text system. Python tools extract and repack containers, decode and encode geometry packs, parse and edit missions and spawn tables, and write rebuilt files back into a disc image.
Results
The documentation includes a master reference of functions, a RAM map and disc sectors, and C reference models that are checked against data extracted from your own disc. Two projects build on it: AC1mod, a disc browser and stage and model viewer, and a Persian localization with a renderer patch, a glyph atlas and right-to-left name entry. Changes are shipped as patches only, with no game code or data.