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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

#141

Post by throwaway12053 »

glimshe wrote: post #68
quacked wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that we should change copyright law such that 1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names. 2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.

That would be a tough change... An easier one, which is how things used to be, that everything enters public domain IF not renewed after X years (let's say 20). Abandoned or complex IP would just become public domain unless the owners themselves figure things out and demonstrate interest with the renewal process. Even a modest fee would lead to a huge gain without much friction for the true rights holders.

Alternatively a "use it or lose it" requirement that the company must use the IP in a significant way. Either by proving that the sales of the product is still significant (like GTA V) or provide a meaningful update within X years (unlike GTA 6)

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#142

Post by debugnik »

glimshe wrote: post #68
quacked wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that we should change copyright law such that 1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names. 2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.

That would be a tough change... An easier one, which is how things used to be, that everything enters public domain IF not renewed after X years (let's say 20). Abandoned or complex IP would just become public domain unless the owners themselves figure things out and demonstrate interest with the renewal process. Even a modest fee would lead to a huge gain without much friction for the true rights holders.

Legal would remember to pay the fee for their abandoned works, just in case, while the rest of the company does nil with them. I'd rather address the issue directly and expire the copyright after X years since it was last published.

Then again Disney's old "vault" strategy would counter it, and Nintendo is already toying with it to sell through FOMO. How can it be this hard to make companies keep our digital culture available for sale? It's not even charity.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#143

Post by Sesse__ »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #62

Does decompiling a game made by a certain development team help decompile others made by the same people? Because you might know what patterns to look for?

Yes. Especially when there are common libraries and you can reuse their names, structures or even entire decompiled routines.

There's a fair amount of folklore going around, but less direct sharing than would be ideal.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#144

Post by Sesse__ »

spijdar wrote: post #26
trelbutate wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem isn't that people consider it boring, it's that the use of LLMs is considered essentially sacrilegious, and whatever end-result that's created is considered tainted, often regardless of the extent of LLM usage. Which does kind of suck. Yeah, it's not nearly as cool to say "I prompted a probabilistic pile of tensors and it did the hard work for me", and I think it majorly adjusts how "impressive" projects…

> Yeah, it's not nearly as cool to say "I prompted a probabilistic pile of tensors and it did the hard work for me", and I think it majorly adjusts how "impressive" projects are.

Vibe-decomped projects are also… a different result.

A matching hand-decompile is useful in itself, but it also serves as a proxy for how well you understand the project; how good are the function and variable names, are the structures good, do you understand the entire flow. There are plenty of LLM-decompiles out there that just match but still every variable name is “unk14”, where every flow is total spaghetti instead of going back to something closer to what a human would have written, or even tons of __asm__ statements. The match stopped being a high-quality proxy metric for the quality of the project as a whole. (There are also LLM-assisted decompiles that are high-quality, but then usually with significant human input. And of course, you can try to ask the agent to clean up the resulting mess after you're done matching, assuming you have any tokens left.)

Of course, if you just want the binary back and collect Internet points, you don't care about any of this. But decompilation projects are often made for either a) understanding the game better (for speedruns, TASes, or just general explanation), or b) modifying it. And for both, it is much nicer to have source that is closer to the original.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#145

Post by Asooka »

jaydayvis wrote: post #15

I think Marx is rolling in his grave over the tirelessly expended human to recreate what almost definitely already exists on a floppy sitting in some “IP - Do Not Touch” lock box. But maybe endless puzzles for ever cleverer people is the point of it all.

That's better than the games not being made in the first place because the Ministry of Culture deems it unimportant and puerile, which is what happens in Communism. You also can't have indies, because you can't publish anything without the state's approval, not to mention you also can't sell things for monetary gain.

I think 80-ish days to recompile and old binary is a much better alternative to the total death of human arts and innovation, and the unending list of crimes against humanity that Marx's theory has led to every time it has been applied.

But to keep it a bit more videogame related, Marx always reminds me of this speech by senator Armstrong of Metal Gear Rising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpuUUV2HeE . "We will use an absolute totalitarian state to abolish the state" - a lofty goal turned into complete lunacy.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#147

Post by volfonibros »

ur-whale wrote: post #146

Fantastic work, but my gut reaction: Why? Why snowboard kids and not the ocarina of time ????

Because it's there. Less famous games can have nostalgic value for people, and many are good. I really like Snowboard Kids myself so I got a kick out of it. But also, Ocarina of Time has pretty famously been done and subsequently ported everywhere a couple of years ago.

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#149

Post by AndrewOMartin »

ninjin wrote: post #137
thebruce87m wrote: post #18

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.

If you are interested in the "sequel", Perfect Dark, then there is this PC port based on the decompilation project that plays great: https://github.com/perfect-dark-pc-port/perfect_dark Ported it to OpenBSD for fun an evening about a year ago.

Not to mention the Standalone VR port (I tried it out last night). I played Goldeneye 64 to absolute death in single and multi player, and played Perfect Dark about once at a friends house, and I still had a wonderful nostalgic "childhood dream"-like experience.

Here: https://github.com/Alex-LeTux/perfect_dark_VR

Re: Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

#150

Post by shrx »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #87
jmcgough wrote: post #14

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] htt…

Loving this trend too. It inspired me to use AI to decompile my favorite games as well, mostly Mega Man Battle Network games from my childhood. I'm not going to make it in 84 days though. I insist on understanding the game and documenting it myself instead of just having the AI do it all for me on autopilot. As slow as that is, it's already led to some awesome moments. AI built a literal synthesizer that played back…

Can you describe with a bit more detail how you're approaching the BIOS reverse engineering?
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