Impromptu · Ormeau Labs, Belfast · Thu 10 Sep 2026

Something old Something new

Tim Potter timpotter.dev · Little Thunder

Full disclosure

Co-hosts an AI event.

Turns up to talk about a processor from 1979

And developing for hardware from the 1980s

Things I've made with AI lately

Evenings and weekends

HyperDrift

Sensi

Sky Shred

ZAP export plugin inside Figma — ZAP · Figma plugin

Band Mate drum arrangement plugin inside Logic Pro — Band Mate · Logic Pro plugin

Footi AR

Retro Rally

Ceefax · live football

The honest bit

This part is easy now

Tools

A capable AI model.

Tokens

A subscription and a bit of budget.

Time

An evening. Maybe two.

A post reading: I know literally nothing about coding, and I just built 3 fully functioning web apps in 30 minutes — followed by three localhost URLs. A reply asks why the links do not work. The answer: I do not know, it works here in my laptop.

A different direction

What if we point AI backwards?

Take all this new capability and aim it at old hardware, old formats and old problems that were never designed with any of it in mind.

Elsewhere

I'm not the only one

People are pointing new tools at machines the world stopped supporting.

A post reading: just Claude writing a MacOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows support, beside a photo of a laptop and an HP printer

A macOS driver for a Windows-only HP printer
@kuberwastaken

A post reading: I just converted this typewriter into a Claude terminal. When you type in a question, Claude types back a response.

A typewriter turned into a Claude terminal
@BenJames____

A post reading: Send me a message from my site and it instantly prints on a thermal printer at my desk. Also designed and 3D printed the case.

Site messages printed on a desk thermal printer
@yashbanka123

A post reading: hacking the phone inside was the most interesting part of this project. I couldn't make the software work, so Claude reverse engineered the hardware — beside a red vintage desk phone.

A vintage desk phone reverse engineered into an agent
@ktoya_me

A boy in a 1990s bedroom, controller in hand, playing Sonic the Hedgehog on a Sega Mega Drive wired to a Philips CRT. A Terminator 2 poster on the wall, cartridges and football magazines on the shelves. — Not actually me, photos were expensive in the 90’s 😂

Background

It started with a Mega Drive

Obsessed with SEGA. The music, the pixel art, the boxes, the manuals. I wanted to make games for it before I knew what that meant.

The idea

A Wordle board solved in three guesses: SPICE, GRIME, then BEIGE all green

D A I L Y

What if I demade Wordle for the Sega Mega Drive?

I play Wordle regularly. I've loved the Mega Drive since I was a kid. My brain did the rest.

Attempt one

Slimeball Slayer

AI first. No prep. No plan.

Wrong approach.

That was back in GPT-5.3-Codex.

Attempt two

Started in March. Shipped 1.0 in June.

GPT-5.4 → GPT-5.5

Achievable idea. Clear rules. No scrolling, no physics. Something I could actually finish.

The process

Drawn in Figma
Pixel by pixel

Logo, UI, keyboard: every asset hand-placed on a 320-wide canvas, composed the way I'd compose a website.

320 X 224

The whole canvas

MegaWord at native resolution: the grid, the on-screen keyboard and the desert background

The whole game

Creating a 90’s vibe

The biggest rabbit hole

The background pipeline

512 colours · 61 on screen at once

Hover a colour

1

ChatGPT Image 2.0

Generate the scene.

2

Photoshop

Resize to 320 wide.

3

Indexed colour

Down to 16 colours.

4

Import to SGDK

Quantises it again. Mud.

5

Research

Quantisation, safe palettes, export formats.

6

Custom tool

Snap every colour to a Mega Drive value.

7

Pixel correction

Pencil out the blemishes by hand.

8

In game

1:1. Exactly as designed.

The beach scene after the first import: palms flattened to olive silhouettes, the sea a single dark blue — Step 4 · straight out of SGDK

The finished scene in game: vivid greens, layered blues and the grid and keyboard reading clearly over it — Step 8 · in game, 1:1

Tooling

Building my own graphics pipeline

A background tester and palette swapper: reads the indexed PNG, flags anything that isn't Mega Drive-safe, lets me fix pixels in place and exports SGDK-ready art.

sgdk-colour-swapper.netlify.app ↗

Built with

Software · Hardware

Engine

SGDK

Sega Genesis Development Kit, in C.

Code

GPT-5.4 → 5.5

Scaffolding, debugging, small tools, rubber-ducking at 1am.

Art

ChatGPT Image 2.0

Starting points for the scenes.

Design

Figma

Logo, UI, keyboard, every screen.

Pipeline

Photoshop

Resize, index, export. Then my own tool.

Voice

ElevenLabs

Adding voice sound bites to the game.

Testing

BlastEm · RetroArch

Day to day, on the Mac.

The real test

Real hardware

Mega Drive 2, EverDrive, CRT. Every milestone.

Tooling

An AI that plays it

Plays the build, reports back. Regression testing for a cartridge.

Online

Online leaderboards
Offline console

Finish a timed game.

The 68000, a processor from 1979, encodes your result into a short code.

You type it in at megawordhq.com.

The site decodes it, checks it adds up, and ranks you.

THE PLAYER is the network connection.

Reception

Playing on a Tower of Power and CRT screen, the way it was meant to be!

u/Old_Cyrus · r/SEGAGENESIS

A Reddit thread on r slash SEGAGENESIS: a player posts MegaWord running on a Tower of Power and CRT, and the developer replies, Absolute legend.

MegaWord running on a red portable CRT, sat on a stacked Mega Drive, 32X and Mega-CD, beside Beatles records

What I learned

Respect

For the developers who did this for a living.

No AI. No SGDK. No internet. No forums.

What I learned

A finish line

An album. A film. A cartridge. No day-one patch, no redo. Somebody had to decide it was ready.

A MegaWord cartridge seated in a Sega Mega Drive, its printed label reading MEGAWORD, MD Gold Build, V1.0, with the console's power LEDs lit

megawordhq.com

Questions welcome

Thanks

The game

megawordhq.com

Me

timpotter.dev

timpotter.dev · @tejpotter · hello@timpotter.dev