Geek Up, TOS Down News Posted by Ian Symes on 9th November 2026, 11:25 GOOD NEWS FOR POTTY-MOUTHED ARCHIVISTS! A chap called Jon Williams has brilliantly converted 2006’s interactive DVD Beat The Geek into a playable browser game. I’ve had a quick test run and it seems indistinguishable from the real thing; it basically feels like a DVD emulator within your browser. Even the mini-games work. There’s a Github for the code and whatnot too. We massively applaud these efforts to preserve a notable piece of Red Dwarf ephemera. BAD NEWS FOR POTTY-MOUTHED ARCHIVISTS! TOS appears to have fucked off again. It was updated as recently as 30th October, to note Red Dwarf‘s return to Netflix, and a tribute from Doug to Patrick Stewart, but has since disappeared off the face of the earth. No idea whether this is a temporary glitch or a permanent closure, but just to remind you all that The Unofficial Archive exists, and covers almost everything that was ever published on TOS up to and including the Rob Grant tribute, so at least that’s safe.
Somehow, TOS returned (to being dead). The Beat the Geek reverse engineer is excellent, especially since it’s all open source. I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing it’s an example of the AI assisted reverse engineering efforts that have spun up recently, using the technology for the greater good.
I assume 95% of all coding work is AI-assisted these days. There are a dozen more classic videogames receiving “pc ports” every day. I am a bit weary to run them on my machine in case they have some massive vulnerability, or I’m actively partaking in evil by playing them.
I assume 95% of all coding work is AI-assisted these days. There are a dozen more classic videogames receiving “pc ports” every day. I am a bit weary to run them on my machine in case they have some massive vulnerability, or I’m actively partaking in evil by playing them. Yeah, it’s unavoidable now. My day to day work flat out requires AI agents, especially since a lot of the patches we have to apply are from vulnerabilities found with AI in the first place. A good thing about these recomps is that they’re all open source (and any that aren’t should be immediately ignored) and while that doesn’t guarantee the code’s not malicious, it does go a long way.
The flood of AI-assisted game recompilations, ports and mods has made them a lot less novel, but it seems like a worthy trade off to me. If the result is good either way, there’s no inherent virtue in dedicating years of your free time to achieve something a machine could do in days. The project that made me turn my head was the recomp for the original Binding of Isaac. Previously it was locked into the limitations of 2011 Flash, and now it runs at 60fps with dynamic resolution and native controller support, and has been ported to Android, Linux and Nintendo Switch. This is something that was essentially a pipe dream before LLMs, with a couple of attempts to get a recompilation project going but nothing that went anywhere. I can’t see this come to fruition and call it shit, I’m just not strong enough.
