Decompiling a Nintendo 64 Game in 84 Days

(blog.chrislewis.au)

34 points | by knackers 2 hours ago

3 comments

  • amjnsx 0 minutes ago
    I’m surprised the game companies themselves aren’t interested in these projects.

    Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam.

    Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?

  • hombre_fatal 32 minutes ago
    It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects.

    You become a machine with your workflow, once again limited only by your time/energy, tokens, and your discretion on how to spend it.

    • plastic-enjoyer 5 minutes ago
      > It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects.

      Indeed. But I think it's fair to say that just embracing LLMs is not enough.

  • ThrowawayTestr 19 minutes ago
    Awesome. Hopefully AI will allow more games to be decompiled in the future. Anyone working on a decomp of Perfect Dark?
    • QuantumNomad_ 4 minutes ago
      https://github.com/n64decomp/perfect_dark claims to be “a complete decompilation of Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64”. And: “When a matching decompilation is compiled with the same compiler that the original developers used, the output will be exactly the same as the retail game, byte for byte.”

      Relatedly, https://github.com/perfect-dark-pc-port/perfect_dark forked from the above describes itself as “a work-in-progress port of the Perfect Dark decompilation to modern platforms”. Further: “The game is in a mostly functional state, with both singleplayer and split-screen multiplayer modes fully working. There are minor graphics- and gameplay-related issues, and possibly occasional crashes.”