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Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

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Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#41

Post by Andrex »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #28
gwern wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clearly if it was able to be leaked it already was being preserved Preserved by whom ? Many leaks are done by old or ex-employees who quietly kept a shall we say 'backup' of their work. More than one 'official' re-release has been rumored to be an embarrassed company quietly filing the serial numbers off a rogue leak because they realized way too late that their archival practices were inadequate.

Anti-emulation Nintendo was caught repacking a pirated ROM. https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-...

If someone breaks into a warehouse and makes off with a pallet of cartridges, and then those carts are recovered, would it be strange if Nintendo resold those carts? It's their property at the end of the day.

Aside from that thought exercise, like many "internet facts" this one also might not be true, and repeating it doesn't really help either "side."

https://medium.com/@AberrantWolf/mario-illegal-roms-and-medi...

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#43

Post by InvisibleUp »

SpecialistK wrote: post #31
sigmoid10 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.

Having followed his bsky during his announcement, he started off per-emptively dissing on his haters that... didn't even exist yet. Constantly posting memes about how everyone was dissing him and how AI was totally superior (and then posting his angry sessions with Claude when it got something wrong) when most other users were just "that's cool man". The thing that made him quit bsky was a (now-deleted) thread someone posted criticizing the weird crash-outs. I think he was more... normal about the whole thing, people would have received the project quite a bit more positively.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#44

Post by AshamedCaptain »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #26
jamesu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

Decompilation to C (and even C++!) has been done automatically for 2-3 decades at least. I am not sure what has changed in recent years other than people playing fast and loose with copyright (and GitHub allowing it, likely because their LLMs also stand to benefit). Introducing LLMs here is only going to introduce errors, delays and likely push you away from a reliable result.

The challenge here is readability. Reading the TP source leak you link I think it's even behind the current state of the art, as it's barely above assembly. This is where I suspect even the smallest of LLMs may help, since you don't care that much if it introduces errors.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#45

Post by SSLy »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #2

I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code. I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine. Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com a…

check for console headers. those aren't that easy to get out of LLMs

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#46

Post by lxgr »

casualscience wrote: post #38
tombert wrote: post #6

Maybe with the source code, I'd be able to figure out what the hell happened in the last ~2 hours of the game.

Not much, just accurately predicted the next 30 years exactly

Including the cardboard boxes: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#47

Post by themafia »

charcircuit wrote: post #9

[flagged]

Copyrights were only intended to be secure for a _limited_ time. Originally 20 years. Konami has been granted at least 2 decades of FBI backed security of their property. I'd say they got a plenty good deal and have nothing to complain about here.

Re: Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan

#48

Post by paavohtl »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #26
jamesu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation o…

I don't think it's impossible, but it would take a lot of time and a lot of money; likely more time than good enough models have been commercially available.

I have been working on an incremental decompilation-based reimplementation (basically how OpenRCT2 was done) of Worms Armageddon for the past 2 months with a lot of help from LLM tools; primarily Claude Code and Ghidra MCP. I've worked on it almost every day, reaching Claude Code Max 5x's 5 hour session limit multiple times every day. Suffice to say as a software rendered, sprite-based 90s PC game, Worms Armageddon is several orders of magnitude simpler than MGS2. Despite that, I think it will be 2-3 more months of work before I can compile a fully independent version of the game.

This is despite the game being an almost ideal candidate for automated RE, as it uses deterministic game logic with built-in checksum checks in replays and multiplayer. I've downloaded all the speedruns I could find for the game (as replay files) and I've retrofitted the replay system into a massively parallel test framework, which simulates over 600 games in about 30 seconds. So Claude can port all game logic independently without much need for manual testing; the replay tests can almost guarantee perfect correctness.

MGS2 doesn't have anything like that, so every ported function requires extensive manual testing. Even with LLM tools, an accurate decomp could take years (unless you're willing spend thousands of $currency per month on it).

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