https://github.com/autc04/executor

https://github.com/jjuran/metamage_1/

It nailed it, first try.

I cannot, unfortunately, share a link to the website it created because of the license.

LLM translations of historical software to modern platforms is a solved problem. Try it, you'll see.

I used https://exe.dev/ and their Shelley agent to drive Claude. Give it a try, it is jaw dropping.

Here is the prompt I gave it:

"Use wasm and go and a 68000 emulator to get the Photoshop 1.0.1 software at https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/source/photoshop-v.1.0... to run correctly. You should not require an operating system, instead implement the system calls that Photoshop makes in the context of wasm. Because Go compiles to wasm, you might try writing some kind of translator from the pascal to go and then compile for wasm. Or you might be able to find such a thing and use it."

You can give it a try yourself, or contact me for a private link to it (see the CHM license for why I can't make it public).

When a filter is implemented half in Pascal (setup and loop over the rows) and half in assembly (each row) Claude did it all in Go, but the structure in Go is the same: one entry point for setup and iterating on rows, and one function (ported from the assembly) to process each row.

(As for the resource fork, it just reimplemented the UI in HTML. There's not enough info in the transcript of it's thinking to know if it read the resource file and understood it, or if it used a general understanding of what was in Photoshop, from training data, to do it.)

My mind is blown. I keep trying to find evidence that it just copied this from someplace, but I can't see how.

Just as an experiment, I fed the resource fork to GPT-5.2 to see whether it could render the windows/dialogs in the resource fork - it did a fairly okay job. I think the fundamental limit it ran against (and acknowledges) is that lot of Mac's classic look and feel was defined programmatically, literally, down to calls to RoundRect(...).

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_694dddb290308191babcb07a72367e97

Thanks for posting your experience.

And, for purity/completeness, avoid Maxx Desktop and/or NSCDE; EMWM with XMToolbar it's close enough to SGI's Irix desktop.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html