How much have LLMs sped up these decompilations?
Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#32How much have LLMs sped up these decompilations?
https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-dec... same author wrote about their process
Useful, but complements existing tooling & falls short on the hard part
I work on Ship of Harkinian. We're sering more vibed libultraship ports. Yet to see a real success
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done a similar project before (taking an NES game I like, disassembling it, and doing a PC port). For me, the attraction is being able to make an ideal version of a game I like, with bugfixes, quality of life improvements, added polish, and not having to deal with hardware restrictions from old consoles. The amount of effort involved doesn't really make sense unless it's something you deeply care about, which is…
What was the game?
The Wing of Madoola: https://www.infochunk.com/madoola/openmadoola.html
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#34Always 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 Though these may have a few they missed: https://readonlymemo.com/decompilatio…
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.
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#35How much have LLMs sped up these decompilations?
Significantly. It also has sped up the ability to do recompilations, too.
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#36Awe, why I love hacker news. This game was my childhood! I played it again recently on an emulator and was astounded how much easier it was. Made it to Damian without losing a single race. That seemed impossible at age 10.
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#37The decomp dev guys are doing amazing work. It's also super educational too, if you're someone like me who's in just doing relatively simple AI / python / typescript work and rarely has to think about memory, hardware constraints, all that, it's a completely different world. Also, AI is finally getting to the point where it can do very difficult decompilation work, which is super exciting to me.
It really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that randomly modifies C in the hopes of finding a better asm match) so I...just asked Claude to make one, custom-tailored to my needs. It almost feels pointless to publish it to GitHub when I can just…
The prompt and a couple samples is the source.
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 :)
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.
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#39As someone who has done RE for decades, I feel like I've been seeing a lot of new decompilation projects recently, but even before the rise of AI. Possibly correlated with the release of Ghidra? Either way, it's great to see and perhaps a sign of a greater trend.
Controversial opinion: I think the FOSS movement was a setback and distraction from attaining software freedom as well as giving an undeserved negative reputation to "reverse-engineering" in some areas. RMS had the right idea, but missed the mark when it came to practical application by focusing far too much on "source code". Other industries have long been making third-party parts by merely inspecting existing ones with measuring tools, and let's not forget the whole discipline of scientific research is largely what amounts to "reverse-engineering" the natural world. You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.
Decompiling a binary, finding what you need to change, and then patching precisely that piece, seems like a far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to. Many years ago, I remember coming across a few Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source, and the author explicitly told users that they were to use a Java decompiler to decompile, edit, and recompile if they wanted to make any changes.
Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
#40Always 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 Though these may have a few they missed: https://readonlymemo.com/decompilatio…
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 acc…
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.