I wrote a blog post on the current trend of game decompilations using AI and where we’re going with this. It’s all very promising but oh boy are the implications scary.
Pretty sure “decompiling” has always been the easy step - open the binary with a hex editor and dump the contents as some source code. Making sense of that is where shit gets really difficult - making it work was usually even harder.
Can we please just skip the middle-man and start open sourcing everything instead of burning all the world’s resources to achieve the same goal?
Best I can do is ban software decompilation.
I know a few games that are sorely out of date by active developers and the devs are always like “I don’t have time” or “It’s not that important” or “It’s too hard.”
And I’m like, why don’t you release the code you prick, you don’t care, so why are you still lording over it.
So this could be awesome.
For most games, the answer is “publisher contracts”.
Lol sounds like some of our internal teams.
They don’t have time to support the things they built or to have people help them build it, but they refuse to make the repo internal so that others in the org can help them with it. Instead, they just act like bottlenecks.
I have been trying to recompile a Windows v3.1 game. Once it has finished cooking, I will try to contact the OG game’s author for another freeware release of their work. While quite raw, you can see the bones starting to knit together.
My hardware is an 7965WX, 128gb DDR5 5600, x1 RTX 4090, and x2 RTX 3060. While powerful for a gaming machine, this is modest for AI workloads. I hope to eventually replace the weaker cards with a pair of RTX 4500, as that would afford me greater quality and speed.
This project has taken three days so far, and I am expecting another four to reach parity with the original article. If I had the hardware I wanted, I expect it would have only taken two days for parity to be achieved.
What’s the motivation for even doing this if not to learn? If it’s just to have a playable version of the game, emulation covers that easily. If you want to extend it, you still kind of need to know how the original is designed to understand what types of changes fit within the structure of the game.
Quenzar’s Caverns is such a simple game, re-implementing it is a great project for someone wanting to learn how a graphical application is put together end-to-end. It would even be a good beginner reverse-engineering project if you want to reproduce it precisely, given it’s a 16-bit application.
At the end of the week, you might have a reproduction of the game that you can play. But you’ll have missed out on the opportunity to learn enough about program design to understand why throwing a week’s worth of compute at this task is totally unnecessary.
The goal is to establish a workflow of working with AI, the programs, the behaviors of the models, and so forth. In any case, I always sucked at math, so learning how to program just isn’t viable for me. My strong points lie elsewhere.
My goals are not yours. I want to use AI to translate videogames and other media, reimplement games with modern QOL, and eventually, to have media of my own imagination given form.
this post is the strangest humblebrag I’ve seen in a while
I am talking about my personal experience with the technology. The intention is to inform people what the technology can and can’t do, and what was required. I want other people to see what I am doing, and say “I can do it too!”
I want other people to adopt AI and to pursue the things that they think is cool. Be it creating manga, having tabletop game companions, or recommendations for baking recipes, I want everyone to have a better life from collaborating with AI.
Be it creating manga, having tabletop game companions, or recommendations for baking recipes, I want everyone to have a better life from collaborating with AI.
We used to did all the above together with other human beings. Sounds to me that you just want to replace them with machines. Well, good luck. You’ll never find true happiness down this path, in my opinion.
Not sure what there is worth bragging about
Don’t send a fucking AI-generated message to the original developer
Dude. I didn’t say anything, nor even imply, about an automated message. Also, I previously contacted the author and received permission to distribute the none-AI version of the game.
Seriously, folk like you suck - because you are hallucinating bullshit, and fling it at people.
Yeah, this is pretty awful
if this is scary to you please go outside
The scary implications being that any asshole with a Claude subscription can create something really cool in concept, but will more than likely end up abandoned in a few months when they inevitably give up (because this entire scheme is inherently short sighted) and all that’s left is a codebase so machine generated that likely no human would waste the monumental effort it would take to make it human readable- or logical to begin with.
“AI is a tool”- correct, it is a tool to scam people, and this certainly isn’t evidence to the contrary of that.
I’m not gonna sing the praises of something creating so much waste. Learn how to code, actually contribute to these things. Cry harder.
this is a pretty ignorant and assumptive take
This is very conflicting.
I daily a macbook, and so games aren’t that readily available. To be able to play something like the original Syndicate (1993, SNES and other platforms) or Shadow Hearts: Covenant (2004, PlayStation 2) on my mac would be awesome. I’m very much a patient gamer, so there are so many old titles I’d very, very happily play through again.
But there’s no way this would be restricted to old, dead platform games.
AAA games now cost millions or even, according to GTA 6 rumours, over a billion to make. If a studio publishes a game, and a week later there’s a free AI clone of it, then there is no more AAA games industry. Actually, that also follows for some of the awesome indie games I’ve loved and enjoyed. How can you make money selling copies of your game if there’s a free, or massively undercut, version of it available? Obviously most gamers would like to support creators, but in this economy? They’d probably rather eat and pirate games.
Pirate.
P-AI-rate?
Pir-AI-te?
Psst. Check out OpenEmu if you wanna play SNES games on your mac.
then there is no more AAA games industry
Oh no
Next do Hollywood and the music industry
It means one of two likely pivots if you ask me: the resurgence of highly locked down consoles with hardware protecting the data, or - and this is the most likely path - devs will just resort to making online only games, where lots of the content is streamed in while playing (I mean assets, not the display output - though don’t doubt the latter, if it ever becomes feasible enough I’d posit that devs would migrate to that as well).
Think a “live-events” driven game where every pre-determined period of time you download the assets for that period.
Fortnite-ification of gaming, basically. :(
Cracks have always existed? You could torrent GTA 5 on release day, or at least the single player part of it.
Sure, but with ‘decompiled/recompiled’ games apparently not breaching copyright, you’ll be able to get GTA 6ish without having to worry about torrent clients and magnets and seeds and all that super complex stuff that most people just don’t want to deal with.
If, a week after GTA 6 comes out at £70/£90, Big Stealing Cars 6 comes out at only £20 and is 90% as good… where’s the money going?
If they can clone games with AI so readily (actually it takes a lot of tokens but still less than it was to develop) then I’d think they could put that into developing their own.
Of course, like you said, if someone could just copy it and put it out there as soon as you release it then there is no motivation to make anything if you need to at least recoup your costs.
Why would they waste time and brain developing their own games when they can just piggyback on someone else’s creativity that’s had proven success in the market place?
It’s not LLM decompilation is LLM de-obfuscation
We have been able to de-compile pretty much anything for alomg while now, what’s been harder is making sense of what comes out of it.
The two being conflated c o n s t a n t l y pisses me off
this right here.
the adobe suite re-release is a much bigger deal than just pirated software. it’s the first time we commoners have been able to use the models they trained with our stolen content to steal something back, and it’s glorious.
Another exciting area is open firmware synths. specifically the $70 fm-1 (I think Pi based) is blowing up with synth engines/groove box apps. Its exciting new area for OSS. Its scary for closed synths.
Someone on reddit just vibe-coded a free Roland MC-707 app that turns the Groovebox into a real arranging/performing monster.
Are these AI decompiled games any good? I heard the Adobe ones looked good but we’re actually really slow and buggy
Most of them are really good. The Adobe ones aren’t actually decompilations, they’re just AI-generated apps that try to copy the same functionality which is why they’re so buggy and unfinished. The AI decomps/recomps should be functionally the same as the original games, usually with some edits to uncap the framerate and make it work with higher resolutions.
What is the benefit of AI Photoshop clone over, for example, Photopea?
Photopea runs on the web which makes it way slower than native apps. It chugs a lot when editing a 4k image for example. The other main benefit is that the clone is fully open source whereas Photopea is closed source.
It chugs on big projects, true. Is open source though.
Not scary at all for open source games! Or open source software. What, AI os going to decompile linux and 1000 AD?
Can it decompile windows and make it Linux
It’s called ReactOS :)
We have Linux at home.
Linux at home:
Compile this fucking [expletive] [slur]!
Automatic Ai driven recompilation is not the same as manual user effort to decompile, document and build a human understandable and good source code. That’s why I do not mix up the terms recompilation and decompilation.
I’ve been trying to understand the terms and the opening graphic on this site did a good breakdown.
So my understanding is that a decomp or decompilation is turning the machine code into something human readable. It’s the first step but technically isn’t anything the average person can use because it still needs to then be (re)compiled into a game someone can run.
However the term “decomp” in general usage refers to the human readable middle step, AND a way to create something for the average person.
Versus a recomp or recompilation is performing the conversion of machine code to some middle state, then immediately (re)compiling it into a game the average person can run.
However the term “recomp” in general usage refers to the same, but always with the use of AI.
Is that right?
It’s important to understand that these terms are not standardized and people or organizations may use them slightly differently or interchangeably. This can cause confusion. But in the wild, people have come to use these terms (in my experience, I’m not an expert either) in specific ways. The article you linked seems to do a pretty good job, but we should remember that this is his/her personal interpretation. From your explanation, I would say it sounds about right “in my opinion”.
I lost it and put this lengthy reply. Sorry about that.
Source code and compiled binary
First, it is important to understand the two states of a game: source code and compiled binary. The source code is text form written in a programming language (usually by and for humans), with other source material. If you download source code, its just bunch of text files basically. To play the game, one need to use a compiler that compiles or transforms the text files into machine readable compiled binary files. There are other stuff too, but this is the important part. The game can now be run and played on the platform it was built for, such as Super Nintendo. If you create a backup of the Super Nintendo cartridge that holds the compiled binary, then you get a ROM file basically. And on your PC you can’t run the Super Nintendo games without emulating the hardware.
Assembly
Every CPU has a set of codes and functions, the very basic at the lowest level possible. Assembly is basically that, it is basically the native language the CPU understands. If you code in Assembly, then it is for this specific CPU architectur, such as Super Nintendo. But the CPU only can understand zeros and ones. So you have to translate the Assembly into real machine code, but the logic does not change anymore. So Assembly is machine code, just wrapped up in a better human readable form. This is usually not the source code. Source code is compiled into Assembly and then machine code binary. You can think of Assembly as machine code for humans, if that makes sense.
Reverse Step 1: Disassembly
Disassembly is taking the compiled final binary (such as ROM files in example) and does just translate all the zeros and ones into human readable machine code. But the original variables names and such are lost, so that its hard to understand what this even is due to optimizations by the compiler. Humans have to go through each line and machine code (which is represented in Assembly format) and figure out what each of the lines, commands do, rename each function and so on. This is painful work. What you get is Assembly code that is readable by humans.
When you compile a fully reverse engineered Assembly code, you get the exact same ROM or machine code that you just disassembled. It didn’t change the code, it just renamed stuff basically. So it will just compile to what it was programmed to.
Reverse Step 2: Decompilation
Now that you have something humans can read and reason about their logic, it’s time to write some real and original source code. That means trying to understand the parts in Assembly, then writing in (in example C or Rust language) a language that can be compiled to any other target than the original machine code was intended. This new code is an approximation of what the original source code of the game developers were, but we don’t know.
Now this process is painful and slow. And in the end it does not mean the code will compile to other platforms, it still aims to produce the original game logic for the original hardware (such as Super Nintendo). So they need to make adjustments to the source code, which is finally easy to work with.
Reverse Step 3: Port
Now that you have an easy readable source code in a programming language that is independent from the hardware, such as C or Rust, you can make adjustments. If you aim to play the game on PC, then adjustments are done so it can compile on PC. Whatever is needed, but in short they modify the source code to be able to compile it to other platforms than it was originally intended. That’s a port.
What is a recompilation?
In context of this discussion, a Recomp is basically taking the binary of the game and automatically built a source code file (such as to C or Rust) in one step. This leaves out the manual work of humans to categorize, understand and write good human readable code. The produced code from recompilation is meant to be used by compilers only, that compile to binary. It is not intended to be read by humans, even though its technically source code. Disadvantage is, that if there are bugs then humans have a hard time figure out whats going on. Or to mod the game manually, its difficult too.
This is nowadays often associated with Ai tools, but doesn’t have to. I’m not entirely sure, but the N64Recomp in example is such a non Ai recomp tool.
In general, the best case is that we have good high quality human readable and understood source code; Decompilation. On the other hand Recompilation is much faster.
I read this over and while lengthy I think we’re largely on the same page, which is good because I thought this was all too new and I was way off.
I think you/that article are overthinking it. Compiling just means turning source code (written/readable by humans) into machine code (aka a program/game). “Decompiling” is the reverse of that, where you turn machine code into source code.
A lot of these AI de/re/comp/port/whatever projects are made by script kiddies/morons who don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes you see them claim that a project is a “static recompilation”, but when you look at the code it’s literally just a bespoke emulator that runs the game.
Which is to say, don’t get too hung up on these terms, since they’re often misused either way.
We have to face the fact that soon enough, any type of software question will be over. AI will be able to generate whatever software/feature you can think of instantly. Not sure what’s gonna happen to dev jobs but be ready for some huge shit to hit the fan. We need to break free from capitalism before it kills us all.
We have to face the fact that soon enough, any type of software question will be over.
What’s a “software question?”
Lost in translation I guess… What I mean is anything related to software
I want to see AI turn boring white male game protagonists into awesome POC ladies!
