Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C

#81

Post by skotobaza » Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

paavohtl wrote: post #37

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #13

Dumb question about reverse engineering binaries: is there a way to only do it piecemeal? I'm eventually waiting for LLMs and harnesses to get good enough to reverse engineer BFME (old Lord of the Rings game that still has an active modding community), but it's a multi GB sized game that would have to be done in bite-sized pieces. Basically; can you reverse engineer in bite sized pieces, and recompile/customize their…

Yes, quite easily. It requires some setup, but the basic idea is that you create a DLL and a simple loader program which injects it into your target process. You can then use a hooking library like MinHook to replace individual functions with your own implementations. If the target application is in C++, you can additionally do vtable hooking and replace functions even easier (though it will always be a combination o…

> the basic idea is that you create a DLL and a simple loader program which injects it into your target process

I believe GTA San Andreas reverse engineering does exactly that using ASI Loader [1].

[1] https://github.com/gta-reversed/gta-reversed

Re: Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C

#82

Post by skotobaza » Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 8:10 PM UTC

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #13

Dumb question about reverse engineering binaries: is there a way to only do it piecemeal? I'm eventually waiting for LLMs and harnesses to get good enough to reverse engineer BFME (old Lord of the Rings game that still has an active modding community), but it's a multi GB sized game that would have to be done in bite-sized pieces. Basically; can you reverse engineer in bite sized pieces, and recompile/customize their…

I've just recently finished replaying BFME1's campaigns. The installation process was "fun" in its own way. There were some quirks in game that could definitely be fixed. I haven't used any unofficial patches though. But I would like to see and maybe even help with reverse engineering both of them. The second game gave me even more trouble yesterday. Would be nice to have community versions of the exes.

Re: Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C

#83

Post by charcircuit » Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

skelpmargyar wrote: post #79

charcircuit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These decomp projects are already violating copyright by distributing the decompiled source code. Using LLMs is less risky than sharing the code.

Can you please elaborate on why distributing decompiled source code is violating copyright? And Nintendo is litigious, if it was black and white surely they would have taken down everything by now? How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already?

Because it is clearly a derivative work. The very fact these projects strive to be byte perfect shows that they want to be a copy of the original. These people are not creating a new original work which happens to be similar to a game.

>Nintendo is litigious

But they don't go after every copyright violation. They have a few categories of violations that they focus on. For example go to YouTube and search "pokemon music" and you'll find an endless list of copyright infringement. This doesn't even include the videos people make using pokemon music as background music.

>How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already?

It doesn't matter since the risk of it being an issue is low.