Comment by bouk
4 hours ago
I'll write a blogpost when I actually have it working, but basically I gave the game .msi installer to claude opus 5.5 and said to read these blogs:
- https://blog.chrislewis.au/using-coding-agents-to-decompile-nintendo-64-games/
- https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-decompilation/
And to setup a harness that will decompile the game and start doing a matching decompilation of every function. It set up a bunch of tooling and started a service in the background to do this actual decompilation campaign. I put some instructions into the main opus chat now and then to e.g. add automatic git pushing including a nice svg chart of progress and to switch model strategies here and there i.e. to do a first pass with a cheap model and then switch to opus/sol if the small model can't solve it.
I could now one-shot a new game, yeah.
Maybe a Show HN? I would be quite interested in seeing the results of this project
I've done the same with some old games I used to play, SimTower and Oregon Trail II, both fully decompiled and now running natively on modern macOS.
I'm going to try create an interactive twitch stream where viewers can play the game through the stream and other non-player viewers can trigger events in the game via points.
Crazy time we live in.
Edit, you come to really understand the game in the process, and why things happen and how to better play the game. And occasionally come across bugs, dev assets, assets never used, or assets all coded up, but code never triggered.
Amusingly I just saw a "Show HN" for SimTower running online via WASM:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49676394
decompilation doesn't trigger any safeguard refusals? I would have assumed it would but glad it doesn't. Very cool and would also love to hear more.
Surprisingly, no. I've been using Fable and Astra both to orchestrate decompilation of a relatively modern game (delivered via Steam) and they have no qualms about it.