The Halo Decompilation Project is insane. They’re using LLMs to reverse-engineer the game from bytecode, basically rebuilding it line by line. And they’ve already gotten Halo to boot in wireframe. We’re entering a completely new era of game preservation.

To be technically correct it's machine code, not bytecode. But who cares it's cool. They're rebuilding Halo: CE function by function in C, patching each reimplemented piece back into the game as they go.

repo: btw

See that link, there's many forks and they plan to merge them into an upstream master fork

While this is cool, it's not bytecode. Bytecode targets a VM (Java, C#, Python) and keeps a lot of structure. This is native x86 out of an XBE, decompiling it and rebuilding it as C++ that recompiles to a match, then swapping the Xbox platform layer for a PC one. LLM's make this way faster to do nowadays. Similar to what we did with Theseus.. but I had to do a whooooole lot of manual parsing, and 6 years of work could have probably been compressed down to.. 2? 3?

Hey that’s my footage from the discord, this is actually a Wii port I’m working on lol

On Wii? WTF And can you share the Github, I can donate you some Codex thinking if you give me a prompt

Yeah it’s a SDL 1.2 port for portability, it might be able to run on a New 3DS as well. Wireframe rendering only for now because im just trying to get the core game working.

:)

Maybe I’m not understanding this properly, but what’s the point of decomping Halo 1 when there’s already a native PC port?

They want to increase the player count from 16 to 64 for Big Team Battle. Lol. It's impossible to do that via modding the game since the player count is so embedded everywhere.

something like this would make home emulation and preservation of games even cheaper, faster, and eventually, free (save for the cost of the game and equipment obviously) on top of that, eventually, it'll make it easier to "port" things too.

there's a whole decomp community doing this to old roms too and porting them to PC.

@ongestalte has been decompiling WoW for preservation purposes too

Very nice. This is going to be huge for archiving our gaming libraries.

Once we do this, we take on the ultimate challenge: decompilation of Red vs Blue so we can reverse-engineer Roosterteeth from first principles.

This is why game companies are all trying to move to streaming-only game technology. There will be no more access to game code for reversing, or pirating.

Ngl, sol-high has been pretty impressive at decomp of old games.

Hopefully they reverse engineer Halo Campaign Evolved and put some water on that dumpster fire.

Halo is not compiled to byte code.

next step is applying this to real world videos

Es increíble la de despifarro que están creando las empresas al tener que forzar estos métodos en lugar de dejar el formato físico o directamente, compartir el código (con el lenguaje y comentarios) con lo que ayudaría a los futuros programadores.

Recompiles > Remakes!

Gamers at this point.

Brother, to be on HaloMods in its peak and to see this. What a world.

Stupid question, but by deconstructing &reconstructing a game, this bypasses the need for a source code? Or does it actually find a source code in deconstruction?

It loosely rebuilds the source code using heuristics and patterns from the binary

Then this method can actually fix broken games like Bethesda's Fallout?

thats what I wanted to see. Completely manipulate games with AI like we do already with images & videos. Adding native VR support, increasing mesh resolution, textures, and much more…

can u do it on tribes ascend too?

I don't understand. Isn't decompilation a thing long before llms.

>bytecode We're going to need to start gatekeeping I think

how exactly is this decompiling though? isn't the AI just re-coding the game so the code will be completely different?

beautiful things are happening

Here is a link to the discord where it’s all happening. We have multiple projects cross pollinating on here, and if you are curious on our progress or if anyone has any expertise on how to speed up the processes being done, we would gladly accept you!

Engagement post. Everything in there is 3-4 years old. You created some gif or otherwise to imply this is happening. Really well done in terms of the farm. More effort than most put in.

First it was Ace Combat 6, now this? This is pretty exciting to hear.

This is a very good use of AI

"bytecode"

Wake me up when I can easily swap the needler projectiles with rockets like we did back in the day.

I want this on a Vectrex, and I want it now!