I think the next 10 years or so are going to see a chucklefuck of games reversed thanks to LLMs, which can easily pattern match and operate on contrivedely optimized assembly and output reasonably accurate C/C++ code. I’m one of many right now using Ghidra + LLM workflow. It’s doing the thing it needs to and I’ve helped several communities revive and port their games this way. It is a huge time saver. While I’d personally prefer an actual source code leak, a working reverse job is good enough, even if it’s partial as long as it’s accurate.

I wonder if we’ll get to a situation where a new game is reversed in the first few months by a team effort. Right now it’s mostly solo devs, but a technical team that’s capable without LLMs is unstoppable with them, and given the nature of modding communities, the only thing they are missing is an LLM to grind away at the details of the game that would otherwise take years to find out.