The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude • Hacker News Board

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#131

Post by seba_dos1 » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #122

seba_dos1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a license: https://github.com/djyt/cannonball/blob/master/docs/license.... ...but it's very clearly not an open source license.

ah thanks, you're right - I didn't think to look in subfolders. genuinely never seen a license in a subfolder before.

It doesn't even have to be there, you could state what the license is on a website or in an e-mail. Sometimes you can find it in the header of source files (as seen here as well). Having a "LICENSE" or "COPYING" file in the root of the repository is just a common pattern made even more common by all the tools that can consume it automatically (including GitHub's UI).

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#132

Post by Rastonbury » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

thelittleone wrote: post #125

reactordev wrote: post #89

I’ve been having fun sending Claude down the old school MUD route, giving it access to a SMAUG derivative and once it’s mastered the play, give it admin powers to create new play experiences. I stayed away from decompilation and reverse engineering, for legal reasons. Claude is amazing. It can sometimes get stuck in a reason loop but will break away, reassess, and continue on until it finds its way. Claude was murder…

I'd enjoy watching. A new category of eSports.

not really a game but check out AI Village by aidigest, where LLMs work together to achieve goals with a computer, the stuff they/say do can be pretty amusing

Re: The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

#133

Post by slavik81 » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #38

For anyone else who was initially confused by this, useful context is that Snowboard Kids 2 is an N64 game. I also wasn't familiar with this terminology: > You hand it a function; it tries to match it, and you move on. In decompilation "matching" means you found a function block in the machine code, wrote some C, then confirmed that the C produces the exact same binary machine code once it is compiled. The author's p…

Snowboard Kids 2 was a great N64 game. It was one of a number of racing titles inspired by Mario Kart, but the snowboarding added a bit of a different feel. The battle items were clever, and the stages were really well made given the technical limitations they faced. As a kid with two brothers, we played a lot of competitive multiplayer.

I also remember a few things in the singleplayer being very difficult. The number of times I had to fight/race Dameian in his giant robot running down the mountainside... It's carved into my brain like that footrace against Wizpig in DKR or the Donkey Kong arcade game for the Rareware coin in DK64.

The battle items in Snowboard Kids were clever and memorable. The parachute missile that would launch racers up in the air and then deploy the parachute so they slowly float back down was such a frustrating item to be hit with. The pans that would hit all opponents was iconic and it was hilarious that you could somehow doge it with invisibility. Even the basic rock dropped on the course was somehow memorable.

Great game. It's heartwarming to know that others still remember it and care about it.