A free DeepSeek model plus a custom MCP sufficed to port a full Taito arcade game
Marcot3ssar1 · reddit · 2026-10-28
An Italian developer ported the arcade game Jungle King (junglekj2, Taito SJ hardware) using OpenCode with the free DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model (200K context, zero cost, 50–490 tok/s that degrades as context grows). The original Z80 ROM runs on a C interpreter while memory, banking, video, audio and input hardware are reimplemented in C — verified across 41 functions with golden traces and build-to-build determinism.
The decisive factor was a custom MCP tool he wrote, letting the agent run and query the port inside its workflow: stepping frames, reading RAM/registers, injecting inputs, capturing outputs. Without it, a verification loop of thousands of executions was impractical by hand; with it, the agent ran validation autonomously.
His takeaway: a free model plus a well-designed MCP is enough for projects of this complexity, so the bar for similar work has dropped for everyone. He's asking whether to open-source the MCP for other ROM ports.
More from coding & agent
- Official Claude Code VS Code Extension Trojanized: v2.1.313 Plants SSH Backdoor — jd_pressman · 2026-10-30
- Prove2Me formalizes 2,000+ operations research papers in Lean 4 with Claude agents, 64% done — ChrSzegedy · 2026-10-30
- Optimizing product image alt text with an agentic cosine-similarity loop against Google embeddings — dejanseo · 2026-10-30
- When an AI agent retries a payment after timeout: uncertainty handling is a design decision — tallmetommy · 2026-10-30
- Gemini CLI, Jules, and Antigravity: Google's three overlapping coding tools leave users confused — finbarrtimbers · 2026-10-30
- 1-16 Coding Agents Tested: Teams Burn 36% More Tokens to Save 5 Hours — kyang8093 · 2026-10-30