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Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

blog.chrislewis.au

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Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#11

Post by wombat-man »

amjnsx wrote: post #6

I’m surprised the game companies themselves aren’t interested in these projects. Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam. Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?

I don't know how they made it, but there was a GoldenEye made for Xbox 360 that seems to only update the UI. The controls are maybe a little different, but you can swap between original and updated renderer in game. Anyway, they couldn't ship in the end due to legal stuff.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#12

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

amjnsx wrote: post #6

I’m surprised the game companies themselves aren’t interested in these projects. Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam. Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?

Yes many games are caught up in IP hell.

Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like film or games, the effect on artists or designers can be pretty depressing.

So yes, games are not unique in this way. I am hopeful in the optimistic future case where LLMs lead to lower barriers to entry, UBI, and so forth that copyright essentially disappears, or at the very least is severely reformed.

Many things should simply enter the public domain at a far more accelerated rate.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#13

Post by hombre_fatal »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #4
hombre_fatal wrote: post #2

It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects. You become a machine with your workflow, once again limited only by your time/energy, tokens, and your discretion on how to spend it.

> It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects. Indeed. But I think it's fair to say that just embracing LLMs is not enough.

I'd consider embracing to include developing expertise in the tool.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#14

Post by jmcgough »

I've been absolutely loving the decomp projects that have been coming out lately. Huge props to the writer for this, Snowboard Kids is a real gem.

I'd also encourage people to check out the Legend of Dragoon recomp [1]. It's a real labor of love that has breathed new life into a largely abandoned game. You can play it fully vanilla, or with improved graphics, fixes to cumbersome design choices, bugfixes, etc.

[1] https://legendofdragoon.org/projects/severed-chains/

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#16

Post by doctorpangloss »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

It's especially annoying that LLMs/agents are a logical starting point for decompiling old games but there is a significant backlash against it as the gaming community is very anti-AI and consumers of the benefits decompiling offers tend to be noncoders who don't believe that AI can do more than slop. I've seen takes such as "they're too lazy to learn C++" and accepting a PR from someone using Claude taints the proje…

on the flip side retro games are almost completely and entirely an aesthetic experience. like if something totally subjective and personal like nostalgia is not just a valid reason, but the #1 reason, to be engaged with retro gaming, why isn't some random condition about the process of resurrecting the games also valid?

i think you agree that there is. but it should change your language about this idea of "consumers" and "benefits" - like this is the difference between making code and making a product. nobody NEEDS retro games. in my opinion, they aren't even that good! they are completely and utterly an aesthetic experience. the process IS the product.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#17

Post by globi »

LLMs are truly amazing and I hope those decomp will keep coming! I am currently watching the Test Drive Unlimited decompilation project, which seems to use a mix of LLM decomp and actual engine improvement (porting the game to Vulkan and a new physics engine instead of Havok): https://github.com/opentestdriveunlimited/OpenTestDriveUnlim...

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#18

Post by thebruce87m »

Mildly related, but I have been waiting for goldeneye to be decompiled for a while but before that process has finished there is has been a spiritual successor(?) made that has scratched the single-player itch for me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1574480/Agent_64_Spies_Ne...

Worth a look if you want a bit of nostalgia.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#19

Post by trelbutate »

minimaxir wrote: post #7

It's especially annoying that LLMs/agents are a logical starting point for decompiling old games but there is a significant backlash against it as the gaming community is very anti-AI and consumers of the benefits decompiling offers tend to be noncoders who don't believe that AI can do more than slop. I've seen takes such as "they're too lazy to learn C++" and accepting a PR from someone using Claude taints the proje…

to be fair much of the fun in decompiling/RE is the puzzle solving, it's like a giant crossword puzzle that you fill in bit by bit, slowly figuring out how things work. Having an LLM do large parts of that for you is probably kinda boring for many.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#20

Post by JLO64 »

> One small but useful improvement was to give every task an explicit deadline and expose that deadline to the agent.

I’m really curious about trying this myself. Recently I’ve been handing off tasks for agents to complete on their own more and more. While their work is acceptable I’ve found them to not only take a long time to complete it, but they often add too much complexity and tests.

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