I've found this to be robust for decompiling games, while giving the agents enough freedom to write code that is readable and not waste a ton of time making sure e.g. instruction ordering, register assignments, etc. are all exactly the same. For me, having byte-matching decompilation is only one way to produce a decompilation I know is faithful to the original. This "high-level decompilation" process I just described is something agents can do much more quickly.
(For example, your approach would not necessarily catch all the same overflow behaviors; the OP expressly claimed that "replicating all bugs" was also important, and many bugs are caused by certain overflow behaviors)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260925153118/https://momo5502....
https://web.archive.org/web/20260925153131/https://momo5502....
Come at me, corporate America.
The agents would have had to mess around with compiler versions, optimisation options, and the phase of the moon as well.
If you just went for functional equivalence, it would probably cost 10x or 100x less tokens.
Another false economy was using Sonnet instead of a more intelligent model like Sol 6.1 (1), which would have cost more per token, but is 100x or so better at reverse engineering and coding and therefore can chew through the source code much quicker and make fewer mistakes, meaning less work needing to be scrapped.
In my testing doing a similar task, I ran multiple sonnet for weeks and burnt through ~$1000 in tokens to get 20% completion and output that was pretty bad. After switching to Sol 6.1, it finished the whole task in around 2 days, cost around $50, and it did it with zero supervision and a single /goal.
(1): struggle to use Opus for reverse engineering, too many safeguards. OAI has virtually none, and uses way less tokens so is more economical.
No one is going to use it if it’s a kind of close but not really reimplementation.
Testing functional equivalence is also pretty much impossible. How would you for example test the new one has exactly the same bugs which haven’t been discovered yet. Or doesn’t introduce new ones? This stuff matters for speed runners.
Yet the C code can’t pick what registers to use, so the poor agent is probably shuffling the code around randomly for hours or days until it matches.
That’s probably why the agent dropped down into inline assembly in the first place (the author complained about this), because I bet it’s thinking trace was that this is futile.
Compilers themselves are not even deterministic and running them multiple times creates different assembly.
So, if you reverse-engineer game X and post reverse-engineered code, what exactly do you infringe, how and in which jurisdiction? What changes if it is done via LLM?
(I understand that LLM decompilation is absolutely out of hand right now and something surely will come to trample the fun. But what and when? I suppose american LLMs will have their system prompt updated to forbid any reversing help and report suspicious activity straight to legal hotline)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1vxig19...
- please someone do it
>At current 2026 API rates, 500 billion AI tokens would cost roughly $100,000–$750,000 depending on the model, with most flagship models in the $150–$400 per million input tokens range
That said, I would probably follow this same approach if I were to do this, but with extensive randomized testing as well.
PIF owns EA, when they invite you to a meeting you might start to worry about foil lined room and carpentry tools lying around
In 1986 there was a federal court case, Whelan Associates Inc. v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory, in which it was ruled that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of a computer program was protected by copyright, and thus independently produced software could be found infringing if it copied these elements, even if the code were not copied (or mechanically translated) verbatim. This led to a six-year period in which computer software enjoyed generous copyright protection, such that "clones" of copyrighted software were effectively infringing. It wouldn't be until the early nineties that other court rulings would tighten the rules again, notably Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai Inc.. The 3-step "abstraction-filtration-comparison" test has been used by most courts since 1992 to determine whether nonliteral parts of program code are eligible for copyright protection, and whether another, independently written program is infringing.
HOWEVER, the Whelan standard was never actually overturned or stricken from U.S. law due to legislation or litigation! And companies have sued and won under the Whelan standard! Most notably, Oracle in their copyright and patent case against Google regarding Java APIs in Android. Google ultimately prevailed, but only because the Supreme Court ruled that Google's use of the APIs was fair use; they did not overturn the Federal Circuit's finding that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of the Java declaration code was ineligible for copyright! And I doubt that the Supreme Court would similarly smile on a reverse-engineered complete video game!
I believe that these reverse-engineered projects infringe copyright, under the Whelan standard and perhaps under the stricter Altai standard as well. You do not get a free pass because the original code was in C and yours is in Rust; or because you created a slightly different version of each function in the original code.
And let's say there's a future where an AI model could zero-shot the game itself. What then?
Yet, it is now profitable.
The bet is that people realize how valuable these services are, and despite complaining, they still would pay the higher price. This realization would not happen without this initial subsidy from investors.
It isn't too different from drug dealer's first sample free...
Reading between the lines:
"The avid reader of my blog might have noticed that I had previously written two posts that have since been removed. Everyone else might now be wondering which game I am talking about. To both of you I can only say that corporate America was here to ruin our fun."
Keeping it private likely wasn't the original plan...
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
OpenAI and Anthropic are both 10/mil in.
https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3#providers https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#providers Other frontier models are like 1-3/mil in.
Also, 500 billion is 500,000 millions. At the lower end of your 140/mil estimate that's 70 million dollars. Even at my 2/mil lookup for Chinese frontier models that's one million. Show your math for 100k-750k, please.
Taxis were an established profitable business model and the uber subsidisation wasn’t anywhere near as much as AI subsidies.
????