It has been a rough journey but I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just recently redid the website and thought maybe the full story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.
I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)
I'm still curious, however:
> That's not a marketing angle—it's a headline that writes itself.
Any ChatGPT assistance there?
The problem was not em-dashes — but binary opposition!
That sort of thing.
It is a much clearer marker of llm use than the em-dash. The sad thing is when searching for info on this the most convincing reply in search was generated by an LLM, which went on at length about why LLMs do this as some sort of consequence of their internal structure. I have absolutely no idea if that’s true — it really sounds a bit trite and exactly the kind of thing LLMs would confidently assert with no basis. I would want to hear from someone working in LLMs, but their blogs are probably all generated by an LLM nowadays. So this conundrum is a good example of a question where LLMs actively work against clear resolution.
This is in my view the most insidious damage word generators are inflicting on our culture — we can no longer assume most writing is honest or well-meaning because amoral LLMs fundamentally are not wired to make that distinction of true and untrue or right and wrong (unlike most humans) and many people will use and trust what they generate without question, polluting the online space and training data until everything is just a morass of half-known facts sprinkled with generated falsehoods that are repeated so often they seem true.
How do we check sources when the sources themselves were generated by LLMs?
That's what came to mind when I saw the abbreviation. Then I looked it up:
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.
As far as I remember, neither GPT3.5, GPT4, nor Claude Instant did it. I think Gemini was the first to really do it, and then out of nowhere, everybody was doing it.
Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.
Obvious tells numeric details that are repeated: the number of lines of code (repeated six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
No, do. Really.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.
One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.
I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.
'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.
'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.
Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.
MS-DOS 2.0 was a huge improvement, the first release didn't even support subdirectories or hard drives.
Eh, not really. The file system was very different and these early operating systems were mostly a file system. The system calls were almost identical…
There was a time in the world when most PC users could drive the C prompt.
I see from other replies that you now understand the code reasonably well and feel you can expand/extend it while keeping it in BASIC. However, I note you've also done project where you automatically ported Fortran to Lua - are you not interested in trying to do something similar for performance/maintainability reasons? Is there an advantage in keeping it in PowerBASIC?
I've wish listed the game, and look forward to playing it, it sounds like great fun - even the manual sounds like a good read.
Is the whole thing going to be open sourced? I feel if enough people had access it could be ported to any language with today's tools and people.
Is it possible to write a black box regression test framework?
It seems to be a one-of-a-kind simulation product that could be used as part of actual financial/trading training. There's insane value here, giving the source code away for free is absolutely not a good strategy.
I don't really care in this case though, it's an awesome story and it doesn't detract too much. Congratulations!
It was originally a PDP-1 game. If you are talking about the PC remake by B. Seiler, it was only 9KB. There is no need to bother with a relocation table if it's under 64KB.
The real problem is idiosyncratic and esoteric coding practices from a single self-taught accountant working in a language that didn't encourage good structure.
I can translate well-written code without understanding what it does functionally, so long as I understand what it's doing mechanically.
The original author seems to build in the assumption you're not going to translate my code you'll need to rewrite it from the the tax code!
This story is it's own litmus test. Your story is only as notable as bad as Michaels code is!
Don't get me wrong. It seems fantastic game and like others I'm most interested in playing the original DOS version.
But good programs, written by good programmers are not necessarily made with good code!
I might not be a basic practitioner, but as someone who as written serious things in bash and powershell, I can see the allure.
Out of curiosity, how are the things tested? Or is checking core-engine doing things right only up to the developer and their tribal knowledge?
Thanks for bringing this story to HN!
> So Jenkins waited.
This part made me laugh out loud. It made me imagine Jenkins as a time traveller who had made a mistake and got stuck in the past, but knew that personal computers would be invented.
I am sold on the game and wishlisted it but lack of release date saddens me.
I love spreadsheet games like Terra Invicta/Paradox/Simutrans and this seems like a terrific example of one.
As for languages, PB, C++, and JavaScript (Electron/Preact). I chose a no-build UI framework so that it could be modded by players without installing any build tools, just edit the text files in the game folder, and it has been a very good decision.
I know it almost sounds crass, but you should consider letting an LLM take a crack at transpiling the code. Source to source translations are one of the most widely agreed upon strengths of LLMs.
What you need is differential, property testing. I’m sure it would work for you (you can skip the first half as you already have the source):
https://reorchestrate.com/posts/bringing-a-warhammer-to-a-kn...
Are there any plans to break out portions of the Basic engine to a modern language? It's frustrating that the heart of the game remains inscrutable. Surely Ward is tempted?
It's a lovely achievement you have pulled off, and Jenkins must be tickled.
You can imagine my disappointment when in the end, the code is still basically a mystery, and a wrapper around the core game was made.
Not because what you did is not hard or impressive, it's because, up until the line were you said you are going to use a wrapper, you made it seem like you're deciphering the code. That isn't really clickbait, because I had already clicked and spent 20 minutes reading. Being misled felt a bit bad, considering how beautifully the story is written.
Impressive work nonetheless.
So the program most likely is flat: a bunch of global variables (and possibly memory addresses), and instructions ordered by line number, rather than functions or methods.
No line numbers except for goto labels, but gosub is the challenge for transpilation.
(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)
Maybe I missed it, but are you still using the Powerbasic compiler or have you worked around that somehow?
No real functions, only `gosub` and `goto` so everything is a global variable.
I think even assembler for x86 is easier to unravel.
But the best way I can answer your question. WSR does not claim to simulate real markets. It probably leans too much into fundamentals for our time, at least for the blue chip stocks in the game. What is actually is is a M&A and tax evasion simulator on top of a financial market sandbox to create tax implications to be avoided.
Copyright © 2025 looks clear?
> Ward mentioned that the biggest bottleneck was the cryptic variable names—short abbreviations that were common in old-school programming but made the code nearly impossible to follow.
> "He not only commented everything," Ward marveled, "he went through every single line of code and renamed every single variable for me in about three days.
I think it's still fair to use the term "reverse engineering".
"claude code plays wall street raider" would be very very cool.
You are the engineer we all aspired to be. Though, you really are the chosen one.
Wish you the best!
I mean, the article means passing the torch but how exactly is this assured in case the author dies and the estate holders don't release the copyright?
Thank you for sharing your story.
We’ll wait.