5 ms·
Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
- orsorna 4mo agoAwesome, but I always wondered why so much effort was put into decompiling this? Seems like a meme for meme's sake.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- paulryanrogers 4mo agoWhy not? Many folks feel an itch to play a certain nostalgic game that few others enjoyed. And they want to make it even better, especially as our expectations have grown over time. I prefer 1080 as snowboarding games go. Though must admit some fondness for Cool Boarders and a selection of other lower quality games that few will admit to enjoying. Decomp tools for N64 have had some breakthroughs even before AI. Now I imagine it's even better. If that facilitates folks geeking out with their favorite guilty pleasure then so be it!
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4mo ago1080 is good but feels more like a sim than SKII. The Mario Kart vibes of SKII really help with its replayability. And the absolutely comical situations that happen at the lift in SKII
- doctorpangloss 4mo agoBefore LLMs made these sorts of Sisyphean coding tasks tractable for normal people, there was IRC and Discord, where people with a special interest in programming and emulation could be egged on by the people who delight in the memes. I guess another POV is, were the special interest people and the meme lords ever really friends? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you aren't really thinking deeply enough about how and why these sorts of things actually get made. A sense of "community" no doubt.
- sublinear 4mo agoYou lumping together IRC and Discord seems bizarre to me. I'm not sure "community" was always the reason, but we might be talking about different eras. Back in the late 90s and early 00s there were the pioneering scenes for modding, emulation, fan subs, remakes, etc. and it was all highly competitive. I don't mean to shit on anyone's legacy, but it seemed more ego driven and like there was something to prove either personally or politically. It was cultural and maybe even spiritual. Anyone working on this stuff felt powerful. Nearly a century of broadcast media and being told what to do and how feel by people from far away was ending. Disassembly felt more like deconstruction. It didn't feel like love. It was hacking. There's a reason why one can still shout "hack the planet!" into a crowd of nerds and get them to instantly light up. I'm not even saying all this as an old fart. Things just changed so fast since then. I'm in my 30s.
- orsorna 4mo agoThere are idea guys that thought it was funny to decompile an obscure N64 game with little cultural and nostalgic attention, and they found themselves at the intersection of special interest doers which they could egg on into doing it? More I am just confused for why the game was chosen. SM64, Zelda OoT for example I could easily understand the community motivations behind decompiling. This not so much, which makes the whole endeavor even cooler.
- NeutralCrane 4mo agoThese games are less niche than you think. I for one played way more Snowboard Kids than SM64. The other factor to consider is OoT and SM64 are Nintendo properties. Nintendo is one of the most litigious companies in the industry. That alone may shift people away from some of those big name titles owned by them.
- Podrod 4mo agoBoth SM64 and OoT have been decompiled and have PC native recompilation ports already.
- alexjplant 4mo agoI can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).
- throwatdem12311 4mo agoThey do it because they love the game and want to preserve it, and because they can. You don’t need another reason.
- pram 4mo agoSnowboard Kids is an awesome game, not a meme at all.
- flymasterv 4mo agoProbably the best kart racer ever made.
- CursedSilicon 4mo agoSnowboard Kids was to Mario Kart 64 what Banjo Kazooie was to Mario 64
- sunaookami 4mo agoCan't be because Diddy Kong Racing exists ;)
- aizk 4mo agoWhy do we store books in libraries, or write history textbooks? It's about preservation (and curiosity too).
- ndiddy 4mo agoI've done a similar project before (taking an NES game I like, disassembling it, and doing a PC port). For me, the attraction is being able to make an ideal version of a game I like, with bugfixes, quality of life improvements, added polish, and not having to deal with hardware restrictions from old consoles. The amount of effort involved doesn't really make sense unless it's something you deeply care about, which is why most commercial rereleases of old games are emulated instead of this sort of improved native port.
- Larrikin 4mo agoIt was easily one of the best racing games on the system?
- thin_carapace 4mo agoim not going to post with as much confidence as your many other replies ... but this is like one of the rarest nintendo games ... maybe that has something to do with it
- orsorna 4mo agoThis is sort of the explanation I was looking for. So I've learned this is a pretty good snowboard sim and that people really love it, but those aren't as enticing factors as the game just being hard to find. N64 emulation is still not really there and probably never will be so a decomp makes sense.
- nightfly 4mo agoI'd love to do this for Mario Golf 64 but would run out of steam in like a week T_T
- CM30 4mo agoFunny enough there's actually a project in progress to decompile Mario Golf: https://github.com/monde-lointain/mariogolf64 https://github.com/monde-lointain/mariogolf64
- CM30 4mo agoAlways nice to see another game decompiled like this. It's a big deal as far as laying the groundwork for possible ports to PC and other consoles is concerned, and will probably aid modders quite a bit. If anyone needs a full list of these projects (which includes this one), there's a pretty good selection here: https://decomp.dev/projects https://decomp.dev/projects Though these may have a few they missed: https://readonlymemo.com/decompilation-projects-and-n64-recompiled-list/ https://readonlymemo.com/decompilation-projects-and-n64-reco... https://github.com/CharlotteCross1998/awesome-game-decompilations https://github.com/CharlotteCross1998/awesome-game-decompila...
- bthallplz 4mo agoAny idea if there's a place where we can request games for decompilation? I see that one for Burnout Paradise is in the works, but I would love one for Burnout Revenge.
- Karuma 4mo agoWhen people work for an insanely difficult project for more than 2 years, they probably pick something they personally love and don't need any external request.
- applfanboysbgon 4mo agoAs someone who reverse engineers games for fun and preservation, I would personally be more than happy to take an external request. With compensation, of course. Maybe not so much if it's the "do hundreds to thousands of hours of highly specialised labour for free" kind of request :)
- qingcharles 4mo agoWhat is the current SOTA in terms of tools? How are these tools being used with LLMs to speed up decompilation? My current wishlist is to decomp Elite CGA version (tiny x86 binary) back into assembler and annotating all the method names, vars etc. That way I could swap out some of the inner loop using knowledge that has been uncovered in the last 40 years of optimizations.
- RobRivera 4mo ago>n64s greatest game. HEY, it was a GREAT game, but GREATEST? COME ON, this ain't no goldeneye
- jdkoeck 4mo agoWhat a strange way to spell Zelda Ocarina of Time!
- dudeinjapan 4mo agoWas recently discussing N64 games with friends in Japan. Nobody here knew Goldeneye.
- spankibalt 4mo agoYeah, Double-Oh-Seven reigns supreme on the N64. And Bomberman, of course.
- sp9k 4mo agoDid he stutter? SBK2 is #1 and it a'int close.
- pikedev 4mo agoI mean if you look at the N64 catalog at the time when Goldeneye was released then yeah maybe. Looking at the N64 catalog as a whole I'd rank Perfect Dark above Goldeneye in the shooter category. The singleplayer that allowed split screen co-op, the many modes and bots in multiplayer. So much time was spent in that game.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- aizk 4mo agoThe decomp dev guys are doing amazing work. It's also super educational too, if you're someone like me who's in just doing relatively simple AI / python / typescript work and rarely has to think about memory, hardware constraints, all that, it's a completely different world. Also, AI is finally getting to the point where it can do very difficult decompilation work, which is super exciting to me.
- nemo1618 4mo agoIt really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that randomly modifies C in the hopes of finding a better asm match) so I...just asked Claude to make one, custom-tailored to my needs. It almost feels pointless to publish it to GitHub when I can just tell the other contributors "hey fyi you can ask Claude to make you a better permuter"
- canyp 4mo agoThis is the game to be decompiling in 2026. Many good memories.
- foo-bar-baz529 4mo agoHow much have LLMs sped up these decompilations?
- __s 4mo agohttps://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-decompilation https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-dec... same author wrote about their process Useful, but complements existing tooling & falls short on the hard part I work on Ship of Harkinian. We're sering more vibed libultraship ports. Yet to see a real success
- Gamemaster1379 4mo agoSignificantly. It also has sped up the ability to do recompilations, too.
- moritonal 4mo agoMassively, armed with the right tools you can tear apart old software now
- sech8420 4mo agoAwe, why I love hacker news. This game was my childhood! I played it again recently on an emulator and was astounded how much easier it was. Made it to Damian without losing a single race. That seemed impossible at age 10.
- Tubelord 4mo agoIt was a great game. I also play it on emulator now and then. I love the little fight to be the next on the ski lift after every lap.
- userbinator 4mo agoAs someone who has done RE for decades, I feel like I've been seeing a lot of new decompilation projects recently, but even before the rise of AI. Possibly correlated with the release of Ghidra? Either way, it's great to see and perhaps a sign of a greater trend. Controversial opinion: I think the FOSS movement was a setback and distraction from attaining software freedom as well as giving an undeserved negative reputation to "reverse-engineering" in some areas. RMS had the right idea, but missed the mark when it came to practical application by focusing far too much on "source code". Other industries have long been making third-party parts by merely inspecting existing ones with measuring tools, and let's not forget the whole discipline of scientific research is largely what amounts to "reverse-engineering" the natural world. You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist. Decompiling a binary, finding what you need to change, and then patching precisely that piece, seems like a far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to. Many years ago, I remember coming across a few Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source, and the author explicitly told users that they were to use a Java decompiler to decompile, edit, and recompile if they wanted to make any changes.
- basilikum 4mo agoRMS is explicitly about FOSS and not just open source (in the sense of source available). > You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist. Yes, you do. Decompiling and modifying a binary can be illegal itself under the DMCA in certain circumstances. But even if it is not, distributing the decompiled source is against copyright. > Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source AFAIK Java is specifically easy to decompile when it is not further obfuscated. That is not true for many other languages. And while you can technically reverse engineer any language it does make modifying software and even finding out what it does fundamentally more difficult. > far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to. It's certainly more liberating because there are more restrictions you have to liberate from in the first place. RMS argues that these restrictions should not exist in the first place. As for building being difficult, no free license requires the author to use a good and easy build procedure, but the GPL requires them to provide you all the tools required to build the software unless they are already readily available: "The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."
- vandahm 4mo agoThis is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.
- pjerem 4mo agoI agree with you but I’d say the internet is just an enabler for this. It’s the humans who are cool and they even built an entire planetary network to share their cooliness.
- teiferer 4mo agoI understand the technical appeal of this effort, but wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob? Fundamentally, decompilation is not solving a technical problem most of the time (because the source already exists somewhere) but a social one (that the owner doesn't want to release it).
- stuxnet79 4mo ago> Wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob? Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion. Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path. Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous. Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.
- dudeinjapan 4mo agoThis is a game released in 1999. It's silly that source code isn't released for games this old.
- ProtoAES256 4mo agoAnd why would they? There isn't any incentive for the company to do that.
- stuxnet79 4mo ago> This is a game released in 1999. It's silly that source code isn't released for games this old. Completely agreed. But even if the will was there, how do we know the source code even exists? 1999 was a long time ago. Source code is company IP. Generally it's the devs who write it and care enough to want to release it to the masses or archive it properly. But they are not the decision makers. There are too many stories of source code quite literally disappearing despite the devs best efforts. A lot of the times when we do get access to source code it comes from rogue behavior aka a former dev putting their ass on the line for the community (see the recent MGS leak on 4chan). Also like a sibling comment has stated there is no guarantee that the code would be a in a usable format. With the crazy crunch culture in game dev, I doubt most of these studios from the 90s were pumping out clean code. Like an archaeology dig, you'd have to budget a non-trivial amount of time getting what you find in a state that is useable by modern standards. All to say, I think reversing these older games is a worthy endeavor that is not going away anytime soon. I for one, am excited by the productivity benefits that AI tools have brought with them.
- zerof1l 4mo agoI'm not that interested in the game much, but I really like how the repo with the Claude things is set up and the wording. I’ll use some of it in my projects. It’s well balanced IMO, includes all the important details, tools, and scripts, but not excessively wordy. [1] https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp/tree/main https://github.com/cdlewis/snowboardkids2-decomp/tree/main
- pikedev 4mo agoLove to see the enthousiasm for Snowboard Kids. I thought it was more of a hidden gem that not many people know about. I played that game with friends so much when I was young. Never was able to get my hands on Snowboard Kids 2 as it was never in stores.
- r17n 4mo agoI'm so excited about this. My cousins and I still play Snowboard Kids (one) whenever we meet up.
- dsign 4mo agoI'm currently working in a cool hardware project (an "audiogame console" in a stealthy form factor), and I when I read this I had to go through the rabbit hole of comparing the hardware of the N64 with what I'm planning to use, an inexpensive ESP32-P4. It was nice to learn that the RSP in the N64 is similar to the RISCVs in the present-day MCU, with 128-bits wide SIMD. Most of my experience with numeric computing has been using at least 64 bits floating point; can't wait to shoot my foot many times with int16.
- skerit 4mo agoGreat and all, but what about the legality of it all? It wouldn't be the first time that a decompilation project gets shut down. Reverse engineering is (luckily) OK, but reproducing (or, well, releasing) the actual original code with the help of decompilation isn't really allowed, is it?
- freeqaz 4mo agoI've been working on porting Rock Band 3 and Dance Central 3 to PC via AI assisted decompilation. The repos are on my GitHub (https://github.com/freeqaz/rb3 https://github.com/freeqaz/rb3 and https://github.com/freeqaz/dc3-decomp https://github.com/freeqaz/dc3-decomp) Like OP, I've learned at lot in this process. I have versions running in the browser now with a custom WebGPU rendering engine. Still lots of jank and vibes, but it's wild to see what models are capable of with the right tooling. (I've had Claude add extensions into Ghidra for Xbox/Wii specific instruction support) Wild times we're living in. It's great for software preservation though!
- good8675309 4mo agoI love stories like this. I used Claude to decompile an old Windows program and port it to Linux, it was extremely challenging, I had a lot of success but ended up just rewriting it as a new app.
- breakingcups 4mo agoI'm still so sad about the re3/reVC guys getting DMCA'd and then sued by Take2/Rockstar Games. It is the most impressive project I've seen so far.
- grishka 4mo agoThankfully, once something is on the internet, it's here forever.
- AdmiralAsshat 4mo agoThese decomp projects are amazing. Comparing playing Twilight Princess in Dolphin (which is already an impressive feat of engineering) versus the Dusklight decompilation, it's like night and day. I'm also really looking forward to trying the Dinosaur Planet decomp, because the prototype ROM from which it was derived has a tendency to crash the various libretro cores/N64 emulators I've tried.
- randomtoast 4mo agoI think at one point in the future we can do a one-shot decompilation with one of the SOTA LLM models.