4 ms·

Always 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,

by CM30 5mo ago

Always 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 5mo ago
Any 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 5mo ago
  When 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 5mo ago
    As 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 5mo ago
      What 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.
      - flakes 5mo ago
        These models are getting crazy good at examining things like core dumps and disassembly. I've been using an agent to write compiler logic, and its amazing the kind results you can get by having the agent examine the raw binary outputs. I would not be surprised to see agents excel at identifying and labeling patterns for decompilation.
        gspr 5mo ago
        Really? Could you share your techniques that get you there? Inspired by https://github.com/scosman/cursed_browser https://github.com/scosman/cursed_browser, I have a little art project going where the CPU of a virtual machine is entirely LLM-powered. But even though the ISA is well known and clearly in the LLM's training data (it answers question about it mostly fine), I can rarely get it to even decode a handful of instructions in a row correctly. It'll e.g. do 10 instructions right (even execute right!), then just lose the ability to do bit manipulation all of a sudden and fail miserably at even decoding the 11th. If I try to help it along it'll apologize profusely, do it wrong in five novel ways, before it gaslights me saying I'm in fact mistaken.
    - thaumasiotes 5mo ago
      I transcribed several pieces from a public-domain orchestral score of Swan Lake and uploaded them to Musescore's web site. This would have been ~dozens of hours of work. (For me, starting with almost no relevant training.) I did this because those particular pieces were significant to me. But I attracted the attention of another user who wanted to see more public-domain orchestral music on the site, and who contacted me to ask if I was planning to do the entire ballet (no; it's about 600 pages) and if I would take requests. I responded that I was happy to take requests but wouldn't guarantee that I'd do any work on them. He requested Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio, which was a decent guess as to what I might be willing to transcribe (it's the same author)... but I looked into it, listened to the music, and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to keep working on it. So yeah, a request might work, but it's only likely to work if you happen to make an excellent guess about what the person would have wanted to do anyway. Think of it like drawing someone's attention to something.
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago
  [dead]
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
That page absolutely fills me with hope. I don't see some of my cherished childhood games in there. I should start a decompilation project for them...
Gamemaster1379 5mo ago
I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns. Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
- userbinator 5mo ago
  given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment. I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down. People are slowly realising that, along with the voluminous amounts of slop, there are others who have been able to leverage AI with much success.
  - Gamemaster1379 5mo ago
    You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.
    - userbinator 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Gamemaster1379 5mo ago
        Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.
      - Groxx 5mo ago
        Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically. The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle. If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.
boricj 5mo ago
I'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed: - Moon Lights 2: https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp - F-15 Strike Eagle II: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations). The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.
- adonese 5mo ago
  Sorry to ask this, but are there any discord links you can share?
  - wizzwizz4 5mo ago
    HN isn't a good place to share Discord invite links. I'd recommend putting an email address (or something) in your bio – ideally one you don't mind getting spammed – so people can send such things to you semi-privately.
  - boricj 5mo ago
    I'd rather not post invite links here directly out of concern for spamming, but I can leave some easy-to-follow breadcrumbs. The decomp.me Discord server invite link can be readily found on that website and in the README of its GitHub repository. It's the closest thing to a central hub of the decompilation community. You can find some invite links in its chat history by searching for "discord.gg" (including the servers listed below). Some of these Discord servers have a #other-servers or #related-servers channel with tons of invite links to other similar Discord servers. In particular, these servers have those channels: - PS1/PS2 Decompilation - GC/Wii Decompilation That way, you should be able to find dozens and dozens of Discord servers on that topic. There are still many more out there (I've joined at least six others that aren't directly reachable from the invite links inside the servers I've mentioned). There are also other Discord servers about reverse-engineering that can contain discussions about decompilation techniques or projects.

by CM30 5mo ago

bthallplz 5mo ago

Any 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 5mo ago
When 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 5mo ago
  As 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 5mo ago
    What 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.
    - flakes 5mo ago
      These models are getting crazy good at examining things like core dumps and disassembly. I've been using an agent to write compiler logic, and its amazing the kind results you can get by having the agent examine the raw binary outputs. I would not be surprised to see agents excel at identifying and labeling patterns for decompilation.
      - gspr 5mo ago
        Really? Could you share your techniques that get you there? Inspired by https://github.com/scosman/cursed_browser https://github.com/scosman/cursed_browser, I have a little art project going where the CPU of a virtual machine is entirely LLM-powered. But even though the ISA is well known and clearly in the LLM's training data (it answers question about it mostly fine), I can rarely get it to even decode a handful of instructions in a row correctly. It'll e.g. do 10 instructions right (even execute right!), then just lose the ability to do bit manipulation all of a sudden and fail miserably at even decoding the 11th. If I try to help it along it'll apologize profusely, do it wrong in five novel ways, before it gaslights me saying I'm in fact mistaken.
  - thaumasiotes 5mo ago
    I transcribed several pieces from a public-domain orchestral score of Swan Lake and uploaded them to Musescore's web site. This would have been ~dozens of hours of work. (For me, starting with almost no relevant training.) I did this because those particular pieces were significant to me. But I attracted the attention of another user who wanted to see more public-domain orchestral music on the site, and who contacted me to ask if I was planning to do the entire ballet (no; it's about 600 pages) and if I would take requests. I responded that I was happy to take requests but wouldn't guarantee that I'd do any work on them. He requested Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio, which was a decent guess as to what I might be willing to transcribe (it's the same author)... but I looked into it, listened to the music, and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to keep working on it. So yeah, a request might work, but it's only likely to work if you happen to make an excellent guess about what the person would have wanted to do anyway. Think of it like drawing someone's attention to something.
sieabahlpark 5mo ago
[dead]

matheusmoreira 5mo ago

That page absolutely fills me with hope. I don't see some of my cherished childhood games in there. I should start a decompilation project for them...

Gamemaster1379 5mo ago

I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns. Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.

userbinator 5mo ago
given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment. I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down. People are slowly realising that, along with the voluminous amounts of slop, there are others who have been able to leverage AI with much success.
- Gamemaster1379 5mo ago
  You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.
  - userbinator 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Gamemaster1379 5mo ago
      Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.
    - Groxx 5mo ago
      Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically. The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle. If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.

boricj 5mo ago

I'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed: - Moon Lights 2: https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp - F-15 Strike Eagle II: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations). The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.

adonese 5mo ago
Sorry to ask this, but are there any discord links you can share?
- wizzwizz4 5mo ago
  HN isn't a good place to share Discord invite links. I'd recommend putting an email address (or something) in your bio – ideally one you don't mind getting spammed – so people can send such things to you semi-privately.
- boricj 5mo ago
  I'd rather not post invite links here directly out of concern for spamming, but I can leave some easy-to-follow breadcrumbs. The decomp.me Discord server invite link can be readily found on that website and in the README of its GitHub repository. It's the closest thing to a central hub of the decompilation community. You can find some invite links in its chat history by searching for "discord.gg" (including the servers listed below). Some of these Discord servers have a #other-servers or #related-servers channel with tons of invite links to other similar Discord servers. In particular, these servers have those channels: - PS1/PS2 Decompilation - GC/Wii Decompilation That way, you should be able to find dozens and dozens of Discord servers on that topic. There are still many more out there (I've joined at least six others that aren't directly reachable from the invite links inside the servers I've mentioned). There are also other Discord servers about reverse-engineering that can contain discussions about decompilation techniques or projects.