alt Hacker NewsAI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary
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Over the weekend I vibe coded the SNES version of Sim City rules/assets/UI into Micropolis (the open source version of the base game) so it has the feel of nostalgia with mouse controls and modern screen size etc. It was a fun nostalgia trip.
Last weekend I had it decompile the "Kitten Cannon" Flash game and then ran (what I believe was) an exhaustive check of the 36 trillion reachable launch+power+rng combinations to see what the longest run was (I got a little over 11k feet, successfully replayed in the Flash version).
It's so cool to see modifications/enhancements to nostalgic things appear for next to no effort as much as I want rather than be limited by the time I have for it.
People have always been able to steal PC games. There's an entire genre (keygen chiptunes) of music that came from it. I guess this will make it easier to do so, but why do we think suddenly nobody will buy games anymore? I can buy that this might hurt the industry but "the end of AAA gaming" seems extreme?
For older "abandonware" games, this is a huge positive. Especially for all the Flash ones. An entire ecosystem used to exist (Kongregate etc.) which was killed off by the ending of the Flash plugin.
For everything else .. well, it's hugely useful to be on one side of it. I was just today getting codex to explain why the Mac and Windows versions of a library I am using behave differently, which it does by decompiling them. We've yet to see how this pans out downstream, but it's quite likely there will be some sort of retaliatory closing of hardware to attempt to fight it.
I have an agent pulling apart a game right now with a Ghidra MCP server. It's incredible watching it do in an hour what took me literal weeks before AI. I was never a reverse engineering rockstar but now I don't have to be.
I particularly enjoy the narrative around video game decompilation because it's a continuation of what we see in the emulation communities. People that are passionate about certain experiences and want to learn more about the way they're implemented underneath and how it relates to hardware they have access to.
It traditionally involves investing incredible amounts of time and effort and intelligence, but what I think AI does most encouragingly is allows people to access more complex, more modern, more high-performance technologies and interact with them in the same creative and explorational way.
Over the weekend, I was curious about the state of open source touch-based HID support as it compares to the state of proprietary market leaders. I tasked an agent with decompiling and analyzing firmware blobs from the systems I was interested in, and now I have an early alpha version of the most robust source-available multi touch implementation.
There are obviously some legal and perhaps even ethical considerations worth reviewing before considering publishing anything like this, but we have reached the point that proprietary software is essentially open source.
Cloud gaming is going to be pushed hard. You’ll pay more and own nothing.
The most interesting aspect, I think, is that we can now change the games as we like.
I want Animal Crossing to have an infinite world. I want it to be an MMO. I want the animals to have much better intelligence - for example, if I'm a bad neighbor, maybe they should team-up against me.
Zelda MMO will also be cool. It's just a matter of time. Like two weeks.
These are easy to do now. It's an amazing time to be alive.
Like crypto, the "I dont like AI" is more "I dont like HOW people are using the tools." It's the people the author doesnt like.
I wonder how AI handles stuff like Denuvo DRM? I've been building alternative clients for some software I regularly use, and AI is a master in using gdb to find keys, understanding how to construct signatures, hashes, etc.
I have been using and writing exclusively open source software for going on a decade now. I left multiple employers because I refused to use or write proprietary code for them for any amount of money. A lot fewer people are making fun of me for it these days.
I cannot express the amount of joy and hope it gives me in this dark world that every proprietary binary anyone has ever found useful or entertaining is about to be reverse engineered and have all the tracking bullshit users do not want removed. Only useful or entertaining features will remain.
This is about to completely break a proprietary and surveillance obsessed software industry that deserves to be broken.
I am thankful to have a front row seat in Silicon Valley, and look forward to watching every single company be forced to embrace Open Source or die.
I wonder if they were already training AI on decompiled games. It's plausible that the large labs are already using AI to decompile existing software way before random people on the internet found out this was possible. That would also explain why some AI are oddly good at generating video games.
You may not need to decompile games. Here is an open-source iOS / macOS compatibility layer for Diablo II.and the same technology should be applicable on any Nintendo Switch game. https://github.com/jhaizhou-ops/d2r-mobile
I've been decompiling a bunch of games for the past year. It's insane what it can do, and honestly even Opus 4.5 was already really good at this.
I do wonder what this means for open-source versions of games, as in: could companies threaten with legal actions more easily now?
People keep saying that closed source software will be dead soon, but I'm pretty sure that commercial open source software will also be dead and all that will be left of a profitable profession will be some fraction of non-enumerable SaaS interactions live-streaming pixels to thin clients.
As a thought experiment, how many companies do you know that make enough positive revenue to recoup development and marketing costs from a completely open source download that doesn't rely on something other than the open source software itself for profitability, like a proprietary component or some kind of hosting or network or human support service to drive value? I can think of none.
They'll simply roll out new DRM or put all major parts in "the cloud". Peasants should only be allowed a thin client anyway.
Thank you AI for ruining more of our tech freedoms.
It means the end of ownership for AAA titles. GTA6 will be decomped in rust before it is released in some countries.
Mostly awesome, glad to see how technology is progressing so fast!
Only awesome. I can't imagine being scared of this.
I've been learning by using REA to decompile and reverse-engineer older games and software.
It's surprisingly powerful.
What is going to "suck" is when Anthropic blocks its models from honoring decompilation requests. You'll have to switch to OpenAI models :) And after that, another boost for Chinese open weights.
Decompiling is not same as pirating though.
In order do decompile you already need a game. If you usually buy games you'd still buy one. If you pirate games - you'd still pirate it.
So doesn't seem clear to me if there is a lot of lost revenue here?
And pirates don't really need AI do hack a game etc. All possible games have been on torrent trackers since forever.
Possibly ability to decompile and modify it would be a free marketing (from those who mod it and post videos) and only increase sales. Potentially what games should do is optimize builds for this so that mods can be easily created and shared - e.g. you buy a game and apply a bunch of mods created by ai or not.
The only reason I see is when it can hurt sales if some cool mod someone does can't be easily applied to original game and then you have no choice but to pirate it in order to play that mod.
> Someone made a fantastic joke website about how you can copy code with AI and claim it's made in a clean room, so technically you're not under any licensing agreements.
It is not a joke! The naming is so bad so it sounds like a joke. So people like the author assume it is a joke and move on without suing them. They are counting on that.
Good. Someone please vibecode CK3 and Stellaris to not become a slow unplayable mess after 100 years, please.
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Other comments have mentioned it, even in this thread, but I am fairly certain the biggest change this will bring about (very, very sadly) is games and software from big companies being hosted server-side and streaming in content like some video games now do.
This is the future I always wanted, full control over the hardware and software I "bought" but I think we will end up lamenting our moment of empowerment in one way as the time we lost even more agency in the end.
Personal computing is increasingly under threat by government and big corporations, we all need to be vigilant and fight back.