What was done
Matthew Stanley reports five months of AI-assisted work that turned a Tomba! prototype into recompiler frameworks for eight retro systems, each with at least one commercial game running. SNESRecomp is the best documented.
Matthew Stanley (mstan) wrote up five months of building static recompilers with AI help, starting from a PS1 prototype for Tomba! in February 2026. By his account the work grew into frameworks for NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, Virtual Boy, Master System and Game Gear, each with at least one commercial game running.
How it was done
He treats each game as an integration test: a change to a framework only counts when older games still work. Attract-mode demos help because their input is deterministic, so output can be compared with a reference emulator. Tools include Ghidra, execution traces and framebuffer and memory comparisons. He says Claude Opus 4.6 needed close supervision and short tasks, while newer models handled bigger goals and could tell when a game-specific fix should become shared code. SNESRecomp translates 65816 code to C and links it to a shared hardware runtime.
Results
PSXRecomp covers Tomba!, Tomba! 2, Mega Man X6, Tsumu and Ape Escape, and recompiles the real PlayStation BIOS. SNESRecomp projects include Super Mario World and A Link to the Past with widescreen, mod packages and MSU-1 audio. Stanley calls the projects alphas and notes that menus and video remain limitations. The frameworks are now part of the RetroPortingToolkit group.