Mario 64 was byte for byte decompiled to C. It was helped by using the Debug symbols accidentally(?) compiled into the final version of the game.
replyOtherwise they reference rips of the original game.
> It was helped by using the Debug symbols accidentally(?) compiled into the final version of the game.
replyDon't think this was the case, what helped was it being compiled without optimizations.
Most games will have been written in a higher level language first (like C or C++) and then compiled into assembly. With matching decomp, we write C, compile it to assembly, and see how much it matches the retail assembly. Using this we can write C that we theorise is almost identical to how it would have been written originally.
There are things lost during the compilation process (like comments, function names, etc) these we have to name manually and it's a long process to do! But yes, the goal is to have C at the end and once you have C you can recompile using a different compiler and target any architecture you like
replyI suspect LLMs would do a good first pass with function naming.
replyThey do an alright job, but they deffo need human-in-the-loop for the best results. I wrote on my blog about how I wrote an MCP to communicate with the Dolphin emulator. Allows Claude Code to set breakpoints, read the memory, write the memory, etc. It was a super fun way to work with Claude and has made naming functions/structs/fields/etc much easier! https://jpb.dev/blog/dolphin-debugger-mcp/
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