3 ms·

I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code. I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can li

I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code. I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine. Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com and news tower; thedailycheat.com (.com domains are only $10 so i figured why not). You can do this with any game i’ve found. Older games work best due to the forced simplicity of the source code though.

bigyabai 5mo ago
It's (probably) a real leak. There are original comments in Japanese describing cut content and game logic that was scrapped in the final release.
- jayd16 5mo ago
  Raw assets are probably the better tell
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 5mo ago
It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet. >and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine lot of people claiming this the end result is the AI downloading an emulator and rom
- AnotherGoodName 5mo ago
  >Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet. Did you try the above links? I haven’t shared the full source but all game mechanics listed in the ja3 guide including code snippets where helpful.
- echelon 5mo ago
  > It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet. There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc. Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc. De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it. It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.
tuna74 5mo ago
How do you verify that everything is correct?
- AnotherGoodName 5mo ago
  I’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.
defen 5mo ago
Whoa, since when is there a Jagged Alliance 3? Is it any good? JA2 is one of my favorite games of all time
- AnotherGoodName 5mo ago
  It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game. Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range. The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view. Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay. It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.
jamesu 5mo ago
There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.
- sigmoid10 5mo ago
  I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp https://github.com/zeldaret/tp I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.
  - SpecialistK 5mo ago
    Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.
    - Grazester 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - InvisibleUp 5mo ago
      Having followed his bsky during his announcement, he started off per-emptively dissing on his haters that... didn't even exist yet. Constantly posting memes about how everyone was dissing him and how AI was totally superior (and then posting his angry sessions with Claude when it got something wrong) when most other users were just "that's cool man". The thing that made him quit bsky was a (now-deleted) thread someone posted criticizing the weird crash-outs. I think he was more... normal about the whole thing, people would have received the project quite a bit more positively.
SSLy 5mo ago
check for console headers. those aren't that easy to get out of LLMs
soraminazuki 5mo ago
There's so much irony in hyping up a machine that launders other people's work, and the way that's done is also giving it credit for other people's work that it had nothing to do with. You can't make this up.

bigyabai 5mo ago

It's (probably) a real leak. There are original comments in Japanese describing cut content and game logic that was scrapped in the final release.

jayd16 5mo ago
Raw assets are probably the better tell

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 5mo ago

It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet. >and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine lot of people claiming this the end result is the AI downloading an emulator and rom

AnotherGoodName 5mo ago
>Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet. Did you try the above links? I haven’t shared the full source but all game mechanics listed in the ja3 guide including code snippets where helpful.
echelon 5mo ago
> It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet. There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc. Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc. De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it. It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.

tuna74 5mo ago

How do you verify that everything is correct?

AnotherGoodName 5mo ago
I’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.

defen 5mo ago

Whoa, since when is there a Jagged Alliance 3? Is it any good? JA2 is one of my favorite games of all time

AnotherGoodName 5mo ago
It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game. Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range. The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view. Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay. It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.

jamesu 5mo ago

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

sigmoid10 5mo ago
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp https://github.com/zeldaret/tp I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.
- SpecialistK 5mo ago
  Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.
  - Grazester 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - InvisibleUp 5mo ago
    Having followed his bsky during his announcement, he started off per-emptively dissing on his haters that... didn't even exist yet. Constantly posting memes about how everyone was dissing him and how AI was totally superior (and then posting his angry sessions with Claude when it got something wrong) when most other users were just "that's cool man". The thing that made him quit bsky was a (now-deleted) thread someone posted criticizing the weird crash-outs. I think he was more... normal about the whole thing, people would have received the project quite a bit more positively.

SSLy 5mo ago

check for console headers. those aren't that easy to get out of LLMs

soraminazuki 5mo ago

There's so much irony in hyping up a machine that launders other people's work, and the way that's done is also giving it credit for other people's work that it had nothing to do with. You can't make this up.