alt Hacker NewsI've had a lot of success decompiling old video game ROMs in exactly this way. Like you say - give it a way of verifying correctness - put it in a loop - and they are quite surprising.
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kenerwin88 • today at 3:51 PM
Oh wow, this is almost exactly what I’ve been doing with Zelda LTTP. I have it in rust now, but just finished the “first pass” you reference. Mine is still not really readable, second step is the modernizing the actual code. I’ve really struggled with needing to handhold it though, I’ll see if I can plagiarize from you!
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revetkn • today at 4:19 PM
Very cool, me too! I've been working on Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy and WonderSwan Color) and King's Bounty (PC - DOS). It's great for reversing. Really interesting to see the guts of the games, including bugs.
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Same. I love reverse engineering embedded stuff.
Even the cheap LLMs are great in doing the awful crud work in the beginning: finding offsets, firmware update file structures, brute forcing checksums, etc.
It still produces a lot of crap in the later steps (understanding the implementation itself) but I'm happy doing this stuff myself then.