Porting Old Delphi Games To The Browser

This is pretty nice. I had some old Delphi games made more than 20 years ago that I wanted to get running again. They’re not very good games, but they were ones I spent a lot of time on in the past, and I wanted to make sure they were preserved in some way. In the past I would try to get them running in an emulator, with limited success. My ultimate goal is to get them running in the browser so they would survive any more platform changes.

This morning, it occurred to me that it’d might be possible to ask an agent to port it to JavaScript. After a little bit of searching to find the original source from all the backups I have (this was before I knew about source control), I threw the problem to Claude. And after a couple of hours, it produced a pretty decent port that runs in the browser:

I’m going through some fine tuning with the agent at the moment to work around some breaking changes in the level. But so far, the ports have been working beautifully. In fact, this is probably the best the game has ran in quite a while.