Show HN: RE3 – Reversed Engineered GTA3 Source Code
github.com
github.com
The links in the readme still point to https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3
This is awesome. I’m curious what other projects owe their success to the pandemic?
>"Machine code can be (more or less) mapped 1:1 to a human readable form called assembly language, but it's still very tedious to read.
>"To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this process.
>"So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++. This is sometimes quite easy and sometimes hard, but in any case it's a lot of code and you're bound to make mistakes."
>Thankfully, the code for GTA 3 on PS2 and Android includes debug symbols. Debug symbols contain all the extra information needed to debug a game during the development process, but are often stripped out for release executables to avoid bloat. For whatever reason, Rockstar left these symbols in, giving the reverse-engineering team a huge leg-up.
>"We were very lucky we had symbols for the games," aap says. "PS2 [GTA] 3 and all the Android releases have names for the global stuff (functions and global variables). This was a huge help and I don't think we'd be anywhere near reversed GTA without them."
https://www.eurogamer.net/how-a-small-group-of-gta-fanatics-...
1. Write hello.cpp
2. Compile
3. Disassemble to asm with objdump -d
4. Give asm to Claude and ask it to write the C++ code that would result in that asm
5. Got back hello world in c++
So, it seems you might not need a specially trained model.
Original:
#include <iostream>
int main() { std::cout << "Hello, World!" << std::endl; return 0; }
Reproduced:
#include <iostream>
int main() { std::cout << "Hello, World!" << std::endl; return 0; }
Since then Ghidra was released, so the process is somewhat simpler, if not as much *fun*.
THe level of effort it must have taken is enormous.
I peeked at the source code expecting what asm - > C reverse engineering tools usually spit out, which is quite a mess, but this is clean and commented.
I stand in awe.
Isn't that what has happened here? They decompiled the program and gave each function and variable a meaningful name, added comments and fixed some bugs.