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Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

blog.chrislewis.au

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Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#51

Post by flakes »

qingcharles wrote: post #38
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These models are getting crazy good at examining things like core dumps and disassembly. I've been using an agent to write compiler logic, and its amazing the kind results you can get by having the agent examine the raw binary outputs. I would not be surprised to see agents excel at identifying and labeling patterns for decompilation.

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#52

Post by vandahm »

This is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#53

Post by boricj »

CM30 wrote: post #6

Always 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'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed:

- Moon Lights 2: https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp

- F-15 Strike Eagle II: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re

I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations).

The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#54

Post by startpage_com »

Gamemaster1379 wrote: post #41
userbinator wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.

[dead]

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#55

Post by Gamemaster1379 »

zuzululu wrote: post #50
Gamemaster1379 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.

big reason why i stopped using reddit

I've been off-and-on again. I stopped using it for years. I begrudgingly began using it again as I founded a private game server (before AI was viable, even, so it wasn't sued) for a game that shutdown a few years ago. Perhaps hilariously, the moderators there also didn't like me and told me to eat shit when I suggested people start doing packet captures. At least they warmed up to me over the years though and actually endorse the project now. Doesn't make the rest of the website any less of a cesspool though.

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#56

Post by pjerem »

vandahm wrote: post #52

This is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.

I agree with you but I’d say the internet is just an enabler for this. It’s the humans who are cool and they even built an entire planetary network to share their cooliness.

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#57

Post by thaumasiotes »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #17
Karuma wrote: post #12

Earlier 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 :)

I transcribed several pieces from a public-domain orchestral score of Swan Lake and uploaded them to Musescore's web site. This would have been ~dozens of hours of work. (For me, starting with almost no relevant training.)

I did this because those particular pieces were significant to me.

But I attracted the attention of another user who wanted to see more public-domain orchestral music on the site, and who contacted me to ask if I was planning to do the entire ballet (no; it's about 600 pages) and if I would take requests.

I responded that I was happy to take requests but wouldn't guarantee that I'd do any work on them. He requested Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio, which was a decent guess as to what I might be willing to transcribe (it's the same author)... but I looked into it, listened to the music, and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to keep working on it.

So yeah, a request might work, but it's only likely to work if you happen to make an excellent guess about what the person would have wanted to do anyway. Think of it like drawing someone's attention to something.

Re: Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

#59

Post by dolmen »

userbinator wrote: post #39

As 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 repu…

Decompilation allows to fork, but scaling the fork and making it maintenable on a long time scale is a technical challenge.

The FSF succeeded at changing the mindset towards more collaboration.

I agree that this also allowed to divert efforts from research on reverse engineering tooling by reducing the needs.

But AI is game changer for reverse engineering, so no secrets will be hidden in binaries.

In a way, this is a merge of an alternate branch of history where RE would be more powerful.

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