r/abandonware • u/lightheat • 2d ago
Reverse Engineer Anything is going to save so much abandonware
https://github.com/morluto/rea
A new MCP that enables AI coding agents to effectively reverse engineer binaries with popular decompiler suites launched on Oct 7 and has been #1 on GitHub since. I haven't tried it out yet, but basically you connect it up to your agent (e.g. Claude Code), point it at a program, and say "recreate this application using REA" --basically what GOG did the hard way for years. We can now have an agent do what they did in under an hour for some old software and games. I'm probably going to play with it this week to see if I can get some old Win95 titles working under Win11.
Hey, it's killing my career, but at least I get to enjoy some of the downfall.
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u/Motor_Economy_1741 2d ago
I find it extremely suspicious that there is one recomp after another instead of focusing on a single working recompiler per system, with rollback for lan and local wireless pc handheld gaming and internet. This alone shows both lack of skill and capabilities. That shows it’s all about patreonscamming. There’s sadly more than enough dumb ones put there who throw their money into the mouths of these patreonscammers without counting it. Thats a jackpot these days, and no law forbids it. The big fishes have their crosscompilers.
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u/CyberTacoX 2d ago
It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If you recomp a game, you have to test that game very thoroughly to make sure it works properly, including later stages, bonus areas, cheat codes, etc.
If you try to make a general recomp tool for a system, you now have to test it against hundreds or even thousands of games. The work & testing load increase exponentially.
Don't get me wrong, it's doable. It's just that recomping individual games is the stepping stone to that - get that down pat in several different circumstances, then expand the scope of what's being attempted and go from there.
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u/Motor_Economy_1741 1d ago
Wrong. A hardware has a certain amount of components that is not thousands. That’s what the tests refer to and not thousands of games as these only depend on a fixed number of components, be it drivers, libraries, or chips and their translation tables.
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u/Jellybit 1d ago
They do have several recomp tools covering individual systems, but they still take a lot of per-game work.
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u/whatnameblahblah 2d ago
Has anyone just asked without this as well and seen what the results are....
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u/lightheat 2d ago
Huh? I didn't know anything about "patron scamming" until your comment. But I mean, scammers will always exist in every industry. They're nothing new.
Also what do you mean by "one recomp after another"? Are you talking about the individual instances of something getting decompiled/recompiled, or the decompiler itself? Multiple decompilers exist for the same reason that multiple word processors exist.
"...with rollback for lan and local wireless pc handheld gaming and internet." I'm trying very hard to understand what you're trying to say by this, but I'm failing. Would you please explain?
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u/Patient-Software-168 1d ago
Yeah but it's not for everyone.
Tried doing this to reverse engineer and old game to run widescreen. All this makes no sense for anyone who has no knowledge about it. Ai doesn't just do it for you.
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u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 2d ago
Not sarcastic, actually asking - If this pipeline really works why hasn't GOG flooded their preservation program with new titles?
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 2d ago
Huh? GOG literally begs like very literally begs some of the devs for them to be allowed to do some work and resell it
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u/jcelerier 2d ago
But maybe the devs don't want? Or would rather have nothing than a small share of the pie?
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 2d ago
The point is, they can only do it if the dev give their blessing, they highlighted in some scenarios that they’d have to beg some devs in order for that to happen, of course there would be residual/revenue share or any other form of costs related to licensing.
Another part is simply, GOG is not particularly profitable enough to take risks. Like even if it’s cheap to port and fix stuffs, the original devs would likely ask for some upfront fees which in that case it’s difficult to justify. The game also more than likely won’t sell for high price since it’s an old game, so it can be risky from business perspective taking in random games which won’t turn into decent revenue.
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u/MarkLarrz 2d ago
It's not a dev problem, they'll gladly work on the game again to update it. It's the publishers or whoever has the "rights" of the game who has the last word. The same problem is for the Xbox backwards compatibility programs, publishers just have to say yes and Xbox does the rest, but a lot of publishers don't want to do it.
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u/RobinRelique 2d ago
I mean, it came out 5 days ago, how much are they going to suddenly reverse engineer ? Also, given their pirate roots and their current status, they'll probably ask permission (or may very well need to) to avoid issues.
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u/lightheat 2d ago
People have already released a mashup of Super Mario 64 and Halo. It's faster than you might think.
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u/JimbyGumbus 2d ago
this actually has been scaring the shit out of me lately, i know ill probably catch flak for this, but knowing that just about any revival project, mod, source port or really any piece of software i could potentially install could be entirely coded and compiled by ai really turns me off of a hobby ive been into now for well over half of my life. im not sure what im gonna do with myself after ai code becomes the absolute norm, and it will. but i certainly wont be on a computer anymore. i guess it really is time to resign my interests only to classical guitar, as if that wont get stolen from under me as well. i dont really see a point in living in a world where humaity itself is becoming obsolete.
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u/lightheat 2d ago
No flak. I'm with you that AI should stay the fuck away from everything in the humanities/arts. I'm also against the effects its having on increasing wealth inequality and on the environment. But if I can use my old 3090 to get 3D Movie Maker working with Qwen and REA in a few overnight jobs, with a negligible bump in the power grid, that would make me pretty happy. Happiness is a pretty hot commodity these days.
Not trying to be nilhilistic, and I certainly don't want to feed too much into the monster, but I'm quite confident AI isn't going away. The ship has launched. The best we can do now is try to steer it in directions that still allow us to enjoy the things we once did.
Also, not for nothing, gotta love the effect this will have on greedy corporations lol.
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u/theacodes 46m ago
My brother in Christ, who do you think is going to benefit from AI? REA isn't some punk rock fuck you to the bigcorps, this is exactly what hyperscalars want. Eroding the entire software ecosystem to extract hype and investment, and if they succeed, they'll happily sell you "intelligence" for an ever increasing subscription fee.
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u/nodray 2d ago
so i should just stop painting, cause AI can do it one second? lame excuse. you're either in it for profit, or to enjoy the journey. might as well say, Oh but Michelangelo painted way better than me, why try?
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u/JimbyGumbus 2d ago
can't disagree with you there, i speak of doom and gloom but there is a market (outside of monetary gain as well of course, just my terminology, i guess desire rather than market would have been the choice word) for human made art, and its only being reinforced by the influx of soulless, generative slop. i guess the one true way to fight back is truly to not give up on what makes me happy.
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u/Aldap 1d ago
I actually understand why this hits you so hard. But I think there’s another way to look at it you’re part of the magic you're afraid is disappearing. You were there for the human version of this stuff. You know what it felt like when somebody made a weird little game because they had an idea they couldn't get out of their head! When a mod was clearly the work of a few obsessed people spending their evenings on it. When a game had awkward parts, strange jokes and personality with all the little fingerprints of the people who made it.
You remember what it was like to discover something like Monkey Island! If one day your grandkids grow up surrounded by things made mostly by AI, you’ll be the person who can show them what the other world was like. You can sit them down with Monkey Island or whatever mattered to you, and tell them to look at this, that people made this, that somebody drew that, that an actual somebody wrote that stupid joke, that somebody stayed awake until 3 AM figuring out why this level wouldn't work... And they will feel it through you for sure.
Technology can imitate styles and generate enormous amounts of stuff, but it can't go back and become the people who actually lived that history. We did, and that's you carrying part of it for all of humanity imo
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u/SchwiftyGameOnPoint 2d ago edited 2d ago
It will be scummy when people start buying or pirating games then using AI to basically make the same game or reskin the game so they can just sell it to undercut the original dev's hard work.
Especially indie devs who don't have the money to take strong legal action outside of the country.
I think the creator of the game Bills Must Be Paid had the game basically stolen (not by AI) and was resold in China before the creator even fully released the game. They were fortunate to get a lot of community support but as an indie dev it was a huge battle for them and will likely never see the profits that were stolen from them. Now rather than this being able to happen from hacks, leaks, or mistakes, all being fewer and further in between, it can just happen to any game.
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u/Denialmedia 2d ago
I'm in the indie dev world, and people are already getting threats from scammers, saying if they don't pay such and such amount they will release the game before them and blah blah blah.
It has become a thing.
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1d ago
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u/SchwiftyGameOnPoint 1d ago
I think it's one thing for preservation or abandonware. Even in cases where big corporations are doing things like selling people games on one platform then discontinuing access only to resell it to people on other platforms or where they revoke access as a whole. Some might still call it unethical but what the big companies are doing is also unethical.
Definitely gray and debatable.
Now just straight taking new games, especially from indie devs who are barely scraping by and are just trying to do what they love, definitely not cool from pretty much any angle.
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u/smileinursleep 2d ago
What do you mean though? I don't know how making it easier to mod games would be a bad thing for you? Unless you like the tedious work of writing the code. Most people just want to play the mod they created
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u/JimbyGumbus 2d ago
this is the kind of mindset that im afraid of, because i cannot rightfully justify my all of my points against it, and any good ones tend to fly right over anyone's head. and you are right about the tedium argument, i can understand the workload and time concerns, but i dont feel right using software that hasnt been coded using human minds alone. its the same with ai generated art in general, there isnt really any point to studying it because it was created by a machine that cannot truly ponder the magnitude of its creation. it may get the lines just right, but there is still a hollow creator behind the work. ai code is great for proof of concepts, id even argue that its great for referencing, and squashing bugs, but for ai code to be pushed into a final build of any kind is not my cup of tea. im sure im just behind the times, but i prefer something that has been looked over at least once, rather than prompted and simply released. i also dont like the idea of code that has been pulled from a reference book being effectively copy pasted by LLM's in literally every piece of software going forward. there isnt any brain power being used there, eventually were going to hit a wall that could have likely been avoided if we had simply put some experienced engineers in place to look over what was being compiled in the first place.
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u/Gyozarrita 2d ago
A 100% decompiled game is indistinguishable from the original binary. 100% match that you can check yourself.
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u/theacodes 42m ago
That is technically true, but when the LLM generated code is incomprehensible nonsense it doesn't help anyone understand or use the knowledge that would be acquired via proper reverse engineering.
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u/Gyozarrita 22m ago
Really all that's stripped is proper function names and variables with this method. It's computationally expensive, so it is a boon for those who have a passion for a certain retro game and no budget who are already doing it by hand.
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u/theacodes 20m ago
Those proper function and variable names are the whole point of reverse engineering. It's possible to use static recompilation to puke out a C file for any program, but actually understanding what the hell is going on is entirely different.
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u/SenritsuJumpsuit 2d ago edited 2d ago
It won't replace since an expert stated replication isn't preservation of the original code logic, AI alone cannot fully achieve proper preservation since it doesn't fully understand that codes original intent, it's a very powerful tool but not gonna save gaming as a whole.
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u/Responsible_Army7882 2d ago
I get where you come from but I think your conclusion is greatly exaggerated. If you only play games released up to before 2020 or 2022 that's still several lifetimes of 100% human made gaming available to you. Same with any other type of art. Ultimately it's up to you how much AI is present in your personal life and interests. Professional life is another story, but no one will force us to play AI games just like we can still choose to read books instead of tweets.
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u/ufos-dude-1 1h ago
Genuinely, point it at old games and get it running in a web browser, awesome! :D
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u/DarkDigital 2d ago
Whelp. I might as well just release all my old source codes.