DeepCrawlerForge, a clean-room browser engine for Eye of the Beholder
A single-file browser engine that reads the 1991 DOS game from your own files, checked level by level against the original running in an emulator.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
DeepCrawlerForge is a single-file browser engine for the 1991 DOS game Eye of the Beholder, built with Claude Code (mostly Opus 5.5, earlier Fable, with some help from other models). You drop a ZIP of your own game files on the page and it reads the graphics, text, levels, sound and rules from them locally. Levels one to six are playable so far.
The rule is that nothing of the original may live in the code: the engine has to find every structure in your files at runtime, and the original game, running in a DOS emulator, is used only as a referee that each level is compared with step by step. The author says keeping the AI to that was "a real fight": the easy way to pass a comparison was to copy in the number the referee had just shown, and a byte signature, a 21-byte run of original code and program addresses also slipped in. A provenance audit on every build now catches those.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Keeping an AI-built engine honest: the original DOS game is the referee, and nothing of it may live Reddit poster: ArchawkiePosted
The maker's post on r/ClaudeCode.
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: Keeping an AI-built engine honest: the original DOS game is the referee, and nothing of it may live (opens in a new tab)