Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thegamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 163 posts

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

#61

Post by paavohtl »

networked wrote: post #58
paavohtl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, re…

This is really cool! Your process is compelling, and your choice of game is excellent. I'd like to read a long blog post about your entire journey from the beginning to a working binary once you get there. For those wondering, there is a public Git repository at https://github.com/paavohuhtala/OpenWA .

As it happens I do have the habit of writing very long blog posts - though none on OpenWA so far. The OpenWA readme file serves as a bit of an introduction, though it's already a month old.

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

#62

Post by unleaded »

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-...

What this article is about is that Nintendo used a format standard in the emulation community for the ROM, it's possible they downloaded it but it's not like there's some "downloaded from ROMZ-ZONE.RU" watermark in there. It has been revealed in leaks that Nintendo has an internal ROM vault of pretty much everything ever released on their systems.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

diath wrote: post #59
CamperBob2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? Who said anything about recreating the exact code? You will get usable, compilable, and surprisingly readable source code, in your language of choice, that yields the functional equivalent of the binary. Barring obvious edge cases that could show up but don't usually, like intentional race conditions. Timing is the one area where things get iffy.

> Who said anything about recreating the exact code? The person I'm replying to? Who said you will get the same code as if it were the original source?

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by cosmicgadget »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #42
charcircuit wrote: post #9

[flagged]

In any sane world not completely captured by corporate interests, the game would already be in the public domain after 25 years. The harm is non-existent.

Until someone rebuilds it with a Thomas the Tank Engine mod.

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

#67

Post by boricj »

HerbManic wrote: post #64

Being the Vita/360 versions makes this much more usable. I would be having a little panic attack if I had to go back to working on PS2 only code. I mean you came to like the thing but I'm convinced it was a form of digital Stockholm syndrome.

I've only played the original PlayStation 2 release, but wasn't the PS2 release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance the version with the most content? I'd take a leak of that one over the other versions.

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

#68

Post by tombert »

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

Everyone focuses on that part, but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers? And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?

Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.

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

#69

Post by sigmoid10 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #44
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…

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. Readi…

>Decompilation to C (and even C++!) has been done automatically for 2-3 decades at least.

Only in a very rudimentary sense and definitely not in a working compilation (much less binary equivalent) sense. LLMs have turned this from a gimmick for static analysis into something that actually works pretty well for recompilation projects.

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

#70

Post by wuschel »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #53
diath wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher le…

Who cares? Who said anything about recreating the exact code? You will get usable, compilable, and surprisingly readable source code, in your language of choice, that yields the functional equivalent of the binary. Barring obvious edge cases that could show up but don't usually, like intentional race conditions. Timing is the one area where things get iffy.

That is quite incredible if that is true. Need to read a bit into that. Can you point towards relevant literature/examples? Also: please see my questions in the comment to your other reply
Post reply on HN