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I'm sorry that the focus on whether this article was written by an LLM or not, rather than the fact that you spent years on a labor of love. It's an excellent effort and I don't care whether the article about it was written by an LLM or not, I enjoyed it.

If this comment wasn’t from an LLM, you write well enough to not need one butchering your text.

I'm sensitive to detecting LLM writing and it wasn't distracting at all reading this. It read well! Awesome work.

I would say you shouldn't apologize, that's what ai tools are for, to help us humans. Instead of rewriting manually, try a specialized for writing tool such as bookswriter.xyz or sudowrite

There certainly are arenas where LLM writing provokes adverse reactions, and in general I think people are becoming less tolerant of it.

Personally, I often find the smell of AI annoying, but I don't mind the way you used it in this article, and after all, there are some good use cases for AI writing.

I assume it will become easier and commonplace to configure LLMs to produce 'de-ragebatified' writing styles.

Pretty soon I reckon we'll be so inundated with AI content in all media that it simply won't be possible or rational to be offended by it, it will just become our new reality, our new world.

It's definitely a time/energy vs quality tradeoff. You say you're not that great of a writer, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. But I can tell that your natural narration style is much higher quality and more enjoyable to read than what an LLM can generate (even if it's trying to copy your personal style).

It's a tough tradeoff for me both as a consumer and as a do-er. I am very sensitive to LLM-isms. Like many other millennials, (even if perhaps not quite most) I grew up online from a young age when text was the only viable communication medium, so I learned to notice incredibly small nuances of how someone writes and use those nuances to infer/personify the narrator. LLM's not only stick out like a sore thumb, their language actually "jams up" my 'text-personifier' neurological circuits. It's like my brain is saying "WTF? Why can't I synthesize any reasonable model of the person who wrote this?" the entire time, even if I know it's AI. That's frustrating, exhausting, and alienating.

So yeah, as I said: It's a tough tradeoff for me both as a consumer and as a do-er. I'm glad you used an LLM to do the write-up so that it shows up here and I can enjoy the work you did. I often use LLM's to write documentation at my startup for both my own reference and for my cofounders. I don't like it, but it's better than not doing it, and sometimes it's better to spend that time on other things, especially when the thing I'm documenting is subject to change very shortly.

I think the sweet spot, for me, is this:

If you're going to write it with an LLM, do so unapologetically. Put a disclaimer at the top. Understand that what you are delivering to your audience is not the LLM output, but whatever output was generated from your own input (work, vision, ingenuity, perseverance). Keep the LLM generated content concise, sharing only the necessary narrative and information to give consumers the context they need to understand whatever the actual work product is. The less slop I have to struggle through, the better - LLM's are absolutely awful at narration. And then make it easy to explore your actual work product!

I'm not sure my strategy might cause posts to never reach the front-page. I hope that our audiences can understand that this might be the best compromise and come to accept it in some cases. I will continue to point out when HN posts show strong signs of being LLM generated (as judged by my own tuned sense of nuance, empathy, and theory of mind...not whether they use em-dashes) but the intent isn't to tell people "this isn't worth reading". The intent of disclosing LLM generation is to inform people that the best way to consume the content is to switch to their personal "I'm reading LLM generated content"-mode and experience it through that lens.

Interestingly, my startup seems to have taken a somewhat similar strategy with vibe-coding. We're all aware that vibe-generated codebases are objectively worse, harder to read, and harder to maintain than our best hand-written code. It tends to fail on dumb edge cases and just doesn't have the "vision" that hand-written code would, because it glosses over decisions that we'd have paused and thought about for awhile before adjusting our vision and proceeding. But doing the initial proof-of-concept or prototype with LLM's greatly speeds up the period of exploration where we go "We're pretty sure there's a good a way to do this, and we're pretty sure we know what that way is, but there's a few unknowns that need to be proven". With hand-coding, those "unknowns" can take a long time to work through. With vibe-coding, we can try several different strategies, learn about the reality of implementing those strategies, and then go back and hand-write something more maintainable from scratch once we're pretty sure we've landed on the approach that we judge will be "stable". The timeline/priority for converting vibe-code to hand-code depends on how long we expect that code to last, how central it is to the system, and how important it is for humans to be able to debug, maintain, and interface with it.

Thank you sir and I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I hope it's successful but we will see.

> This is such a well written story, [...] you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read.

Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.

As a dude with an enterprise development background it was my first thought. Rewrites are almost never the answer.

The reason I discovered options prices were wrong is because for fun I created an In-The-Money visualization graph for when you're doing advanced options spreads and I noticed that the graph was asymetrical and profitability and loss made no sense. So with the help of Claude we debugged the code and came up with a pricing strategy that was closer to Black-Scholes. And it really is because it takes into account industry volatility and such it was a fun side quest and Michael is happy with the result which I am very proud of! It really makes me confident that one day, long live the king but, he is in his 80s. Decades from now I will be able to survive on my own, I hope.

Options pricing was not correct, which MJ knew because he simply based it on lookup table using ratios of a spread on a random security in his brokerage account decades ago! I tried to implement Black-Scholes best I could, my one contribution to the engine thus far. MJ has patched several things such as runaway interest rates and commodity prices, too-easy crypto price movements. Typos here and there. Certain edge cases that only a highly skilled player would ever come across, which due to the Discord server brought those players out of the woodwork to battle harden the game and a place for them to report the things they always knew but never had the motivation to report. But for the most part the engine is pretty damn solid.

> It was basically equivalent to MS-DOS in capability

MS-DOS 2.0 was a huge improvement, the first release didn't even support subdirectories or hard drives.

Ms-dos was primitive beyond belief. Barely more than a program loader.

It is said be way of comparison to modern platforms. Which seems pretty accurate.

> after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.

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…

Yes. Primitive behind belief.

There was a time in the world when most PC users could drive the C prompt.

Good eye! I hope to go back and finish editing it. But it's better use of my time to work on the game itself. But hey, I did all the research at least which took me years so. I just wanted to share the story instead of listing bullet points. I have pretty bad ADHD so, I didn't wanted the article to be a rambling.

I did exactly that originally. But here is the reality. Michael only knows BASIC and he has felt the agency to continue patching and working on the code, adding features even, since it is still BASIC. When others tried to port it to C++ be felt like he had no agency and wasn't motivated to help. So while he's still motivated to work on it, it needs to stay in a language he can work with. And thanks for wishlisting!!!

It was never really reverse engineering as the source code was available to the developers (including Ben), and Michael even took the time to give meaningful names to variables, etc. I suppose the author meant to say it was hard to actually understand what's going on both in Power Basic and in the domain of knowledge because of the massive complexity of the game.

That is almost entirely true and yes it's a click baity title, and it worked ha!

Spacewar was ported to Plato from Control Data; I played a little, but I played a lottt of Avatar. There are a number of Plato games that probably have some older / early game developers. Out of curiosity I just looked up Avatar, Bruce Maggs coded it in ‘76 and went on to among other things be one of the Akamai founders. But he’s 20 years younger than Russell.

I am definitely sharing this with Michael he will be happy to be pushed down in the dinosaur ranking!

The two developers mentioned/compared were for the games the op has ported.

Spacewar.com was such a classic game. Why wasn't it an exe??

Join Discord there is a channel dedicated to instructions on contacting him. He no longer sells the game except mailing him a check. A completely unrelated factoid... He LOVES $30 Amazon gift cards...

I continue to advocate for the fact that Michael's code is not bad at all. There are some anti patterns in it for sure, what engineer hasn't fallen into those traps. The fact is Michael is an infinitely better programmer than many of the senior developers I've worked work in my career. I truly sing high praise to his software development capabilities, not just coding itself but building the product, delivering results, and getting it out the door, especially a simulator like this with no reference points, no formal training, no help? Sure it took him 40 years and it's in BASIC and uses gosub everywhere. But the damn thing works and for anyone who took the time to learn the language and structure as I did, you will see that it is actually very enjoyable codebase to work with.

Manual smoke testing and touching the original code as little as possible, for now. I am working on an automated testing solution although it will require a lot of backend changes in order to do create fixtures.

I referenced a LOT of articles and case studies on legacy rewrites and ports in that first year. It is definitely a challenge that even with LLM still exists and I am happy to add to the body of knowledge surrounding the subject.

If I can't get a response from a publisher here soon, I will be setting an Early Access release date of 1-2 months from now to give me some time to build up more wishlists before I pull the trigger.

I figured the engineering crowd here would enjoy the technical journey and I am so grateful it got to front page so that I may talk about the technical side which I enjoy doing. I am not a hermit by nature and posting on HN really was a cry for someone to ask me a question about the backend. So I really appreciate all the technical questions gives me an opportunity to get into the weeds a bit.

Haha sometimes I think he is with the things he tells me.

i guess if it was public you could cheat or understand it. its incomprehnsibilty is just like the real markets - you can never know why or how

I built an FFI via event dispatching and shared memory pointers/matching structs. Imported the C++ UI layer as a DLL via Win32 LoadLibrary. The PB shares a big array for storing global pointers allowing them to read/write each other's memory. The C++ has an event queue and has DLL functions the PB can call to peek/pop the next event. It actually isn't that complicated, just took me forever to come up with the idea.

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 can tell you from reading the code in the 90s, no LLM will save you. It’s well written, but it’s not structured like modern programs. IIRC he invented his own trampoline system using goto that will leave you scratching your head for days, just trying to figure out how it works. An LLM might be able to guess, but it def isn’t going to one-shot it and that means you will need to be able to understand it as well.

https://wallstreetraiderwiki.com/index.php?title=Running_on_...

Not impossible but a lot of work. But with Custom Data API and Set Game State API you can do a lot of what you may wish you could do from modding the frontend. Not ideal but it goes from impossible to a possible!

I understand the code now after working with it for so long. I even improved the options code to use Black-Scholes so I have a few tricks up my own sleeve. The reality is, now that I have mastered the codebase structure and BASIC... Why would I port it? I have plans on how to keep it in BASIC and make it cross platform e.g. web based.

I am working with Michael to remaster it. He transferred the domain name to me and I just redid the website. I'm not sure when the last time he updated Roninsoft website, but he has "retired" from working on WSR, although has been a huge help with the remaster. https://www.roninsoft.com/#:~:text=!!!%20Check%20out%20WallS...

I gather the version of Basic is not Object-Oriented.

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.

The BASIC from that time was pretty limited, IIRC.

No real functions, only `gosub` and `goto` so everything is a global variable.

I think even assembler for x86 is easier to unravel.

a) At the time it was impossible for me. I think I could actually do it now. But now that I can read the BASIC... what would be the point? If I wanted it cross platform, I will build a virtual machine. b) Claude Code has performed exceptionally well. I haven't tried the most recent Codex update. But I don't see the point in spending thousands of dollars on tokens to rewrite it when it works perfectly fine. It would be much cheaper to have Claude Agent build the virtual machine. That's just my opinion. If it ain't broke don't fix it I guess. I do want to bring it to mobile though, whether that's a phone app or responsive website.

The code is not a mystery anymore! I'm going to rewrite the article from the feedback I received here. Because I do understand the code now, but it still has been been rewritten even though I could now. This is so Micheal can still add his ideas to the game. Not because I can't work on the code myself, I can. I can code in BASIC now, Micheal can ONLY code in BASIC.

An Agent Team of Opus 4.6 should be able to reverse engineer the simulator in a day or two, instead of 3 years. But it wouldnt be so much fun I guess.

I'm not sure how feasible that would have been three years ago.

Good luck doing that without proper tests - I assume finance stuff is quite complicated and blanked porting with AI is insanely difficult, especially companies have failed in porting it by hand.

Others attempted to build from scratch or port it without the original developer's involvement. I worked directly with Michael and built a bridge layer into his existing codebase rather than rewriting it.

I'm sorry what is the question?

I would love to do this. I do plan to code a PowerBasic virtual machine in order to make the game cross platform which would allow for a future with Wall Street Raider Online because my true dream? I want to play it on my phone!

It is a cult and you should run while you still can. I would say to get to the point I'm so now I had to understand 40-50% of it. Let's face it, I work as a software developer and I don't remember half of the code in the project, maybe more, and I wrote it all! And this is way more complex than a business app. The reason I had to understand a lot is hard to explain but I will try... Basically a function might be called "FrontBuy". In this function contains all the math and all the decision tree logic and workflow for every possible situation to buy a stock. So now you say, let's replace all the Win32 dialogs with Electron front end. So what I did was I maintain essentially a high level GUI state manager in the Power Basic which controls the Electron app, using the C++ DLL as a FFI. That being said, you had to have some modicum of understanding of every function, maybe not all the math, but at the very least the workflow and structure of the PB code so that you don't break anything. And oh boy, did I break everything, many many times, to the chagrin of my beta testers.

You're welcome!

You're damn right we can.

It is classic parrot slop.

I forgot to ask, do you have links to any of the Reddit threads? They’d be a fun read!

Sorry I am slow! I do it on the side so. Bear with me. I try to market and post updates when I can. Even this onslaught of comments from hitting frontpage is overwhelming but I am trying to be gratious and respond to everyone!

For the longest time I've had this feeling in the back of my head that most of the AI hype is from people who were bad at the job to begin with so they can't recognise limitations. This comment is a perfect example

Please do go ahead and report back to us in 10 minutes.

We’ll wait.