I have had an influx of these game decomps on my Instagram recently and was wondering why so many were appearing out of nowhere. Shortly after that influx, the open-sourcing Adobe Suit thing happened and again its on my feed. Most of these projects use AI to make it easier to decomply these things and understand why it was used but I am a bit worried about the implications. As in, will these decomps actually be stable? Will they be maintained? Will companies start lobbying for AI laws harder now, in a way it benefits them and not us?
I personally stay away from AI due to the many issues AI brings but I am a fan of people fighting big companies but is this the way to do it?
Decompliation projects are cool when they’re used to extend functionality beyond what could be done in the original game and romhacks. It’s awesome to see Super Mario 64 with uncapped framerate and a modern camera.
But a lot of these projects kinda seem like they’re not adding anything that can’t already be emulated. I suppose just having a decompilation is step one that can enable future enhancements, but it seems like recently there are far more of these being slopped out than there are modders interested in doing anything with them.
The fact that a lot of them are just slop now is kind of the problem.
There was a team decompiling Super Smash Bros Melee. It was slow going and they eventually switched to using AI to do it. You can tell where they switched if you look at the source code they published.
The old sections done by hand contain function names like “HSD_PadGetRawQueueCount()” containing variables like “queue_count” and “interrupt”. The new sections generated by AI contain functions names like “Fighter_Spaghetti_8006AD10()” with variables like “x221F_b3” and “x2224_b2”. This is slightly better than reading the raw assembly, but clearly nobody in the group understands what the new sections control or how they work if they can’t even give the functions and variables proper names.
So what’s the point? Why decompile Assembly nobody can understand if the result is archaic C code nobody can understand?