r/claude • u/porkyminch • 22h ago
Showcase Opus 5.5 can translate pretty much any retro game in about 4 hours.
Pics related are a couple of GBC games I had Opus 5.5 translate. Each used about 7% of my weekly limit on the $100 plan. They're both very playable and the scripts read much better than I'd have expected. I've now done this about 5 different times and the results are always solid. Works on original hardware with a flashcart.
You can do it with literally anything as long as there's a decent emulator out there that you can set up for agent use. I'm serious, any game. The last screenshot is an RPG for a series of chinese electronic dictionaries.
This works, it's consistent, the results are really solid, and it's cheap to do. If there's anything you've ever been curious about playing that there's never been a fan translation project for, Opus can get it in your language with a nice variable width font and everything. Not as good as a really dedicated fan translation (you're definitely going to lose some nuance and some jokes) but man it's so cool to actually be able to play anything and understand what's going on.
Pictured games are:
Crazy Tycoon (Feng Kuang Da Fu Weng) for Game Boy Color - A really nice looking clone of Momotaro Dentetsu. I've played a 5 year game all the way through on original hardware without any major bugs.
New Investiture of the Gods (Xin Feng Shen Bang) for Game Boy Color - A turn based RPG from Taiwan, it's an update on one of those 16th century Chinese novels. I've played a few towns into this and it's pretty cool. It's got kind of a shonen structure so far, with the characters being wandering Taoist exorcists.
Both of these were translated using this emulator, a customized version of Sameboy I put together for this.
Last game is a WIP, I don't have all the tooling kinks worked out. It's a BBK e-dictionary game. 伏魔记 is the title, I don't know much about it, but it kicked off a wave of RPGs for e-dictionaries in ~2004. I've always been really interested in games that never, ever would get translated, so it's been cool to just be able to throw a couple bucks at it and get a whole playable translation.
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u/dota2nub 17h ago
Finally someone finds an actual cool thing to do with Claude instead of another fucking dashboard.
I made a PS2 game translation a while back of Busin 0: Wizardry Alternative Neo. That wasn't accomplished in 4 hours and took a lot of gnarly exe hacking, but it's basically the same idea.
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u/Nillows 12h ago
It would be interesting to translate mother 3 for the gba, and compare it to the fan translation!
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u/porkyminch 12h ago
I don’t really want to step on anybody’s toes. That’s a great translation with a lot of hard work put into it, I wouldn’t want to cheapen it.
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u/Nillows 12h ago
Nothing could cheapen the work they put into it, as people always prefer human made over ai made. I just thought it would serve to act as a good control. Any fan translated game could be used as a measure of quality, for both. You could also do this for official translations too! Harvest moon 64 on the N64 has some pretty hilarious typos in it like 'wellcome'bfor example. You could see if Claude does a better job than official translations too
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u/Yo-Soy-Groot 11h ago
People in those circles will name and shame you just so you're aware. I see it all over the place with game recomps. dariosamo (guy who did Majora/Banjo recomp) seems to have dedicated his social media presence to talking shit about anything AI-developed that steps in or around any of the projects he's worked on. A lot of pearl clutching going on and it's fun to see these guys squirm. However they will come after you if you make enough waves in their space.
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u/porkyminch 2h ago
I try to stay respectful to the romhacking community as much as possible and avoid touching anything that I know somebody's working on (or at least not releasing a cheap AI translation while someone's working on a high effort one, which just feels kinda rude).
But I can't lie, I think it's cool that you can just bang out a completely usable translation to pretty much any game in a couple of hours. Maybe some people will get their feelings hurt, but it's hard to ignore the appeal of being able to play anything. I think the positives outweigh the negatives, as long as you try to treat people okay.
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u/ffxivdia 9h ago
There’s some old anime snes games I’d love to see translated: the old ranma rpg, slayers rpg, to name a couple.
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u/thaiphuongaz 5h ago
Can you share your workflow?
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u/Smooth_Aside_2313 21h ago
This is a great use of it. The part I'm most curious about is the emulator setup: how does the agent check its own work? Does it play through and read the screen to catch text that overflows a box or a menu that broke, or do you verify that by hand?
I've found the same thing building with agents: what makes the results solid isn't the model alone, it's giving it a way to run the thing and see for itself whether it worked.