Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) – complete byte-identical decompilation to C/C++

davikr

How many tokens and which models were used?

wk_end

From a preservation perspective, this is one of the least useful decomps ever, given how committed Capcom is to making sure RE4 is ported absolutely everywhere (kidding!) Made using the leaked debug build and its symbols, which shows how meaningful the work the game preservation community that acquires and distributes these things is. OTOH this is pretty off-putting: > Where the compiler needed a particular source shape to reproduce a register choice or a schedule and no natural spelling was found, the construct is marked with a // COMPILER-DIFF: comment (644 of them: dead tests, empty asm("") launders and anchors, register T x asm("rN") pins, padding statements). To me the value of a decomp isn't reproducing the original bytes per se (we already have the original bytes after all) - it's about reconstructing the understanding of the original game as represented by human-readable source code; getting byte-for-byte is just an indication that you've gotten it right. Needing to add a bunch of slop to force the compiler to match the original output is actually just an indication that you've gotten it wrong - and it's a demonstration of the danger of Goodhart's law, especially as it applies to AI.

ricardobeat

“byte-identical” is one of Claude’s favorite expressions

mikae1

I'm so emotionally torn about all the awesome decompilation work done. Too bad all the cool decompilation is happening for games on early 3D centric consoles. I say this a Quake fanatic. Low res textures combined with that blurry bilinear style filtering is a look that's not easy to love. It's just a generational thing I guess.

LaurensBER

Despite all "hate" against AI in the (retro)-gaming scene I'm genuinely excited to see these kind of projects (not sure if this one involved any kind of AI) and emulation. From a technical perspective emulation is absolutely amazing, it requires deep technical knowledge, an excellent understanding of the source system and the optimisations are on another level.

sharktheone

I hope that the CC0 license doesn't make any problems. It might though since decompilation does not remove the copyright of Capcom. Maybe just hope that they just don't care anymore

groundzeros2015

I opened a file at random. This looks more like emulating the behavior in compilable C syntax rather than recovering the game's programming void Em1eWeaponSet(cEm10* em) { Em10Work* w = EM10_WK(em); w->mot[41] = 0; w->mot[42] = 0; … w->mot[62] = 0; w->mot[63] = ARC(0x26C); w->mot[64] = ARC(0x26D); w->mot[65] = ARC(0x276); w->mot[66] = ARC(0x277); w->mot[67] = 0; w->mot[68] = 0; w->mot[69] = ARC(0x26A); w->mot[70] = ARC(0x26B); w->mot[71] = ARC(0x270); w->mot[72] = ARC(0x271); w->mot[73] = ARC(0x272); w->mot[74] = ARC(0x273); w->mot[75] = ARC(0x274); w->mot[76] = ARC(0x275); w->mot[77] = 0; w->mot[78] = 0; }

Dwedit

The real question is if it's relocatable or not (still works correctly if you add or remove bytes)

shakna

CC0, on the decompilation of a copyrighted work? That's... Not the way it works. You inherit the copyright from the original, as this is derivative. There's a reason decompilation has always been a grey area of seeing whether or not the copyright holder cares.

mw888

Tangential: I have no issue with it, but this seems by README writing style to be AI-assisted. As time goes on, whether AI was used or not will become far less a point of interest - if the project is good it is good. The unceremonious use of (what I speculate is) AI-assistance is becoming more normal. I think a lot of people who were die-hard skeptics will just quietly protest less and less. Also, for people who use it well and poorly alike, the urge to not advertise any AI-use at all is common today. People who know how to use it well don't feel the need to explain themselves to unreasonable absolutist skeptics.

devinprater

Cool, could maybe eventually have a version blind people like me can play through this. A lot of blind vibe coders have been working on making decompiled games accessible.