Comment by cpriest
11 hours ago
For people who've done matching decomps: what burned the most calendar time for you, toolchain freeze or the last 5% of non-matching functions?
11 hours ago
For people who've done matching decomps: what burned the most calendar time for you, toolchain freeze or the last 5% of non-matching functions?
I just did one last weekend, but it is a game that was clearly written in assembler in the first place (Elite 8088 CGA).
Trying to reconstruct the original build environment that Andy Onions (where are you?) used took some time. It was assembled with 16-bit MASM, but you can't easily run 16-bit exes under 64-bit Windows, so a bit of a kludge to set up DOSbox where the LLMs can push/pull in-and-out of it while being able to drive it enough to execute MASM and read the stderr and output files etc to get a feedback loop going.
Making up plausible function names and branch labels was pretty quick for LLMs.
>Making up plausible function names and branch labels was pretty quick for LLMs.
there was official source code release for 6502 port, why not match names from that one?
It's a good idea, thank you. I hadn't thought of it. Assuming Andy Onions had access to the 6502 code to work from. It should be fairly trivial to figure out from the shape of the x86 code.