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I've been absolutely loving the decomp projects that have been coming out lately. Huge props to the writer for this, Snowboard Kids is a real gem. I'd also enc

I've been absolutely loving the decomp projects that have been coming out lately. Huge props to the writer for this, Snowboard Kids is a real gem. I'd also encourage people to check out the Legend of Dragoon recomp [1]. It's a real labor of love that has breathed new life into a largely abandoned game. You can play it fully vanilla, or with improved graphics, fixes to cumbersome design choices, bugfixes, etc. [1] https://legendofdragoon.org/projects/severed-chains/ https://legendofdragoon.org/projects/severed-chains/

melony 20d ago
Any advances in emulators recently? I would love to see Nintendo get into a legal tussle with Big AI. Giant douche can fight turd sandwiches.
- minimaxir 20d ago
  Aside from Switch emulators which get C&D by Nintendo due to private key copyright infringement issues, nothing with existing emulators would cause a legal tussle. AI has zero impact on it.
  - bakugo 20d ago
    > due to private key copyright infringement issues None of the Switch emulators Nintendo took down had such issues, they all required supplying your own keys. Nintendo takes them down anyway because they can, and because they have enough money that no individual can fight them on it. Their takedowns have no real legal standing, and there's no reason why they couldn't do the same for every other emulator, other than them simply not wanting to.
    - ndiddy 19d ago
      Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal in the US to defeat a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work (such as the Switch's game encryption) without the copyright owner's permission. It also makes it illegal to develop or distribute software that is primarily designed to defeat technological access control measures. Yuzu does not function without integrating the Switch's decryption keys without Nintendo's authorization, therefore under the DMCA it's an illegal piece of software. In general this means that any unauthorized emulator made for any relatively modern system is also illegal, since they all encrypt their games. One thing to note is that all the famous legal cases establishing unauthorized emulation as legal revolved around PlayStation emulators. The PlayStation doesn't have anything that would be defined as a "technical measure" under the DMCA. The PlayStation copy protection involves stopping a user from playing a copied game on a real console, not stopping a user from making a copy of the game in the first place.
deleted 20d ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 20d ago
Loving this trend too. It inspired me to use AI to decompile my favorite games as well, mostly Mega Man Battle Network games from my childhood. I'm not going to make it in 84 days though. I insist on understanding the game and documenting it myself instead of just having the AI do it all for me on autopilot. As slow as that is, it's already led to some awesome moments. AI built a literal synthesizer that played back music straight out of the ROM. Mapped out all of the music that way. It was incredible. Have neen reverse engineering my laptop's BIOS as well. AI is fully in charge of that one, and it's nearly done. Hopefully soon I'll have drivers and perhaps even coreboot.
- shrx 20d ago
  Can you describe with a bit more detail how you're approaching the BIOS reverse engineering?
  - matheusmoreira 20d ago
    I just grabbed my laptop's BIOS packages and told Claude and now Sol to statically analyze them. By now it's at around 80% done. Some stuff needs hardware validation, but the AIs were quite capable of doing most of the grueling work on their own. I'm having them reduce the problem as much as possible so I only have to deal with the hardware verification. I'll also ask the AI to reverse engineer the LattePanda Mu BIOS later since I want to use the Mu on my handheld cyberdeck project. Nearly out of usage for the week, sadly. Wish Tibo would push his reset button yet again.
- joquarky 19d ago
  This brings back fond memories of fiddling with programs using a Super Snapshot cartridge on my Commodore 64. I remember one game had a crude speech synthesis and I discarded the game and persisted out the speech synthesis code independently as a separate program to play with arbitrary input.
cleak 20d ago
I love this trend as well. More than any other project or trend, it makes me feel optimistic about a future with AI and little or no slop. I had hoped to someday make retro games for all major 80s and 90s consoles. I started with the Atari 2600 12 years ago[0], and planned to move to other 6502 family systems when I had time. I realized last year that AI could essentially do all of what I considered the hard parts and craft of retro game assembly, which felt like having the rug pulled out from me. Projects like this have really turned that around for me. New tools just mean old things become easier and new things become the difficult (where I think the fun is), but solvable, frontier. This category of projects inspired me to pick back up an Ultima V decompilation project I started more than 10 years ago[1,2]. I'm looking forward to a world where all of my childhood games are cracked wide open for mods, ports, etc. [0]: https://github.com/cleak/FlappyBoot https://github.com/cleak/FlappyBoot [1]: https://github.com/cleak/u5-spec https://github.com/cleak/u5-spec (spec for Ultima V binary) [2]: https://github.com/cleak/u5-engine https://github.com/cleak/u5-engine (Rust port of Ultima V made from the spec; still lots of prose slop)
andrewingram 19d ago
I had a lot of fun with Snowboard Kids. Not quite Diddy Kong Racing, but one of my favourite N64 racers.
featwanz 18d ago
The decompilation trend is amazing, everything ranging from N64 games to people reverse engineering componentry on original Xboxes and such; with the world becoming increasingly more bleak from a tech POV, reading these sorts of posts brings a little warmth.

melony 20d ago

Any advances in emulators recently? I would love to see Nintendo get into a legal tussle with Big AI. Giant douche can fight turd sandwiches.

minimaxir 20d ago
Aside from Switch emulators which get C&D by Nintendo due to private key copyright infringement issues, nothing with existing emulators would cause a legal tussle. AI has zero impact on it.
- bakugo 20d ago
  > due to private key copyright infringement issues None of the Switch emulators Nintendo took down had such issues, they all required supplying your own keys. Nintendo takes them down anyway because they can, and because they have enough money that no individual can fight them on it. Their takedowns have no real legal standing, and there's no reason why they couldn't do the same for every other emulator, other than them simply not wanting to.
  - ndiddy 19d ago
    Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal in the US to defeat a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work (such as the Switch's game encryption) without the copyright owner's permission. It also makes it illegal to develop or distribute software that is primarily designed to defeat technological access control measures. Yuzu does not function without integrating the Switch's decryption keys without Nintendo's authorization, therefore under the DMCA it's an illegal piece of software. In general this means that any unauthorized emulator made for any relatively modern system is also illegal, since they all encrypt their games. One thing to note is that all the famous legal cases establishing unauthorized emulation as legal revolved around PlayStation emulators. The PlayStation doesn't have anything that would be defined as a "technical measure" under the DMCA. The PlayStation copy protection involves stopping a user from playing a copied game on a real console, not stopping a user from making a copy of the game in the first place.

deleted 20d ago

[deleted]

matheusmoreira 20d ago

Loving this trend too. It inspired me to use AI to decompile my favorite games as well, mostly Mega Man Battle Network games from my childhood. I'm not going to make it in 84 days though. I insist on understanding the game and documenting it myself instead of just having the AI do it all for me on autopilot. As slow as that is, it's already led to some awesome moments. AI built a literal synthesizer that played back music straight out of the ROM. Mapped out all of the music that way. It was incredible. Have neen reverse engineering my laptop's BIOS as well. AI is fully in charge of that one, and it's nearly done. Hopefully soon I'll have drivers and perhaps even coreboot.

shrx 20d ago
Can you describe with a bit more detail how you're approaching the BIOS reverse engineering?
- matheusmoreira 20d ago
  I just grabbed my laptop's BIOS packages and told Claude and now Sol to statically analyze them. By now it's at around 80% done. Some stuff needs hardware validation, but the AIs were quite capable of doing most of the grueling work on their own. I'm having them reduce the problem as much as possible so I only have to deal with the hardware verification. I'll also ask the AI to reverse engineer the LattePanda Mu BIOS later since I want to use the Mu on my handheld cyberdeck project. Nearly out of usage for the week, sadly. Wish Tibo would push his reset button yet again.
joquarky 19d ago
This brings back fond memories of fiddling with programs using a Super Snapshot cartridge on my Commodore 64. I remember one game had a crude speech synthesis and I discarded the game and persisted out the speech synthesis code independently as a separate program to play with arbitrary input.

cleak 20d ago

I love this trend as well. More than any other project or trend, it makes me feel optimistic about a future with AI and little or no slop. I had hoped to someday make retro games for all major 80s and 90s consoles. I started with the Atari 2600 12 years ago[0], and planned to move to other 6502 family systems when I had time. I realized last year that AI could essentially do all of what I considered the hard parts and craft of retro game assembly, which felt like having the rug pulled out from me. Projects like this have really turned that around for me. New tools just mean old things become easier and new things become the difficult (where I think the fun is), but solvable, frontier. This category of projects inspired me to pick back up an Ultima V decompilation project I started more than 10 years ago[1,2]. I'm looking forward to a world where all of my childhood games are cracked wide open for mods, ports, etc. [0]: https://github.com/cleak/FlappyBoot https://github.com/cleak/FlappyBoot [1]: https://github.com/cleak/u5-spec https://github.com/cleak/u5-spec (spec for Ultima V binary) [2]: https://github.com/cleak/u5-engine https://github.com/cleak/u5-engine (Rust port of Ultima V made from the spec; still lots of prose slop)

andrewingram 19d ago

I had a lot of fun with Snowboard Kids. Not quite Diddy Kong Racing, but one of my favourite N64 racers.

featwanz 18d ago

The decompilation trend is amazing, everything ranging from N64 games to people reverse engineering componentry on original Xboxes and such; with the world becoming increasingly more bleak from a tech POV, reading these sorts of posts brings a little warmth.