Recreating Alley Cat from an MS-DOS EXE with Cursor
Originally posted on LinkedIn, March 6, 2025.
I recreated Alley Cat, the legendary game from the '80s. This week I saw a post where someone gave Claude an MS-DOS EXE file, asked it to analyze the file, and had it rewrite the entire game in Python.
I had to try it myself, so I pulled out Alley Cat, one of my childhood favorites. I downloaded the EXE from a game archive, opened Cursor, and gave it a “simple” prompt: “Rebuild this for me with Pygame!”
Cursor planned the entire process on its own. It extracted the contents, analyzed them, installed the required libraries, and reconstructed the code without me touching a single line. Fifteen minutes later, I was playing a rebuilt version that looked and felt remarkably close to the original.
We’re at a point where AI doesn’t just help us write code. It can understand, interpret, and reconstruct software from scratch. Every day, I’m surprised by how far these tools can go.