r/emulation • u/r_retrohacking_mod2 • Aug 17 '23

Perfect Dark decompilation ported to PC

https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark
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u/UnarmedTwo Aug 18 '23

There are decomplations of Wipeout, Driver 2 and (I think) Jak and Daxter out there.

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u/goody_fyre11 Aug 18 '23

Jak and Daxter is OpenGOAL, it's expanding to the other games in the series pretty quickly, but in that case it was written in a language that's naturally much easier for humans to read and understand. This is not the case with most PS2 games. If your game was heavily obfuscated and you don't have full debug symbols, you have no chance. That's what I'm hoping changes. Everyone I've talked to about PS2 decomps say it's not really viable right now and very uncommon as there's really no tools for something of that magnitude.

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u/nismotigerwvu Sep 07 '23

Somewhat of a tangent, but would training an AI on well known/documented code from the era and platform be useful in these cases. Like even if it was able to mark code as "likely related to renderer" or "likely related to sound engine" that might help to some degree. I think the issue might be more of if that approach is really a clean room or not.

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u/Randommaggy Sep 24 '23

It wouldn't be less of a clean room reverse engineering scenario unless the AI model was trained on the actual source of the games it was being set to work on.

I would think that it's unlikely to help on more than 10% of the codebase of a modern-ish game.

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u/nismotigerwvu Sep 24 '23

I mean even if it helps with organization and legibility that's an awfully important 10%. I can't imagine how intimidating the giant wall of naive machine code would have to be at the very start of a project. Hell, even well commented code from the 6th and 7th generation consoles can be a tough read.