Recompiling The Lion King With an Agent

I Just Can’t Wait to Be King in 16:9, running as native code. TLKRecomp is The Lion King for the Super Nintendo, rebuilt as a native PC program. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, plays from the Westwood logo to the final fight with Scar, and can widen the picture to 16:9. It took ten days, and AI agents wrote the code. They worked in a loop: try something, compare it frame by frame with the original game, find the first thing that differs, fix it, and go again. This post explains what a recompilation is, how that loop ran, what the first broken tries looked like, what came out of it, and a detour into Donkey Kong Country. What “recompiling” means A SNES game is machine code for the console’s own processor. Normally an emulator runs it: a program that pretends to be that processor, one instruction at a time. A static recompilation translates the game’s machine code into C ahead of time. A tool (snesrecomp) does the translating, and the C gets compiled for your computer like any other…