AREK (Amiga Reverse Engineering Kit) is a free, open-source toolkit I build so that an AI coding agent can take a 1990s Amiga game apart and rebuild it as a modern program for the browser. No emulator runs on the page: the game's own code is translated ahead of time and runs natively, so it plays like the original, moves smoothly on today's screens and can show more of the level than the old window did.
I own several real Amigas and have played them since the early nineties. On a CRT, a game like Alien Breed II scrolls like silk. On a modern monitor through an emulator it never did: the game draws 50 frames a second and that does not fit a 60 or 120 Hz screen, and getting even close meant hours of emulator settings. AREK started from that. Instead of settling for a picture that was almost right, rebuild the game so it can draw a fresh picture for every refresh of the screen, and, once it knows where everything is, show more of the level than the old window ever could.
One rule: the original game is the only truth. Nothing is guessed from memory or copied from a video; every step is checked against the real game running in an emulator.
Find where the code, the graphics and the music sit on the disk, and how the game loads them.
The game's machine code, written for the Amiga's 68000 processor, is translated automatically into code a browser runs fast. No Amiga is simulated.
Run the rebuilt game and the original side by side and compare memory, picture and sound, step by step. Equal, or not done.
Only then the extras the old hardware could not do: smooth motion on any screen and a wider view of the level.
On the way, the checking found two bugs in the original game: explosion debris can fly through a wall and off the map (the game then reads memory outside the map, harmless on an Amiga), and the sound driver can mix up a sound number (a leftover high byte), which silences a channel. Both are handled without changing how the original plays.
AREK started as a test I set up: how far can an AI coding agent get with an old game, given only the disk, an emulator and the rule that every claim must be measured? Further than I expected. The tools the agents built along the way, the ones that worked on more than one game, became AREK.
Alien Breed II is the first game rebuilt with the finished kit from day one. Its first level ran in the browser about five hours after the agent first saw the disks; the rest of the work went into checking it against the original and into the wider, smoother view.
The AI generates nothing here. It does reverse engineering under one rule: every step is checked byte for byte against the game running in an emulator, and whatever does not match is not done.
AREK is a Python package with a command line tool and an MCP server, so an AI coding agent such as Claude Code can use it directly: disk images, the packers of the time, a strict 68000 decoder, a recompiler to C and WebAssembly, an emulator as a measuring instrument, and the pieces a playable web page needs.
pip install amiga-re-kit
arek --helpFound a bug, have an idea, own an original disk, or want to see a particular game next? Write to me in the discussions on GitHub. You need a free GitHub account. For a bug, say which browser and computer you used and what you saw; that helps me the most.
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