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Decompiling games with AI: Virtueel Zoetermeer
Bouke van der Bijl describes using Claude to decompile Virtueel Zoetermeer, an early-2000s SimCity-style urban-planning game commissioned by the Dutch municipality of Zoetermeer and played in schools, reconstructing its Pascal source, publishing it on GitHub and getting it running in the browser at virtueelzoetermeer.bou.ke, after an Age of Mythology decompilation stalled around 60%.
3 min · 652 words
Why Is This Fingerprinting Script Creating Bioweapons?
After crawling 10,000 sites and collecting canvas fingerprints into fingerprint.garden, nullpt.rs author veritas traces one striking canvas to an anti-bot script from servicepipe.tech that is packed with anti-LLM obfuscation: function names about ricin and dirty bombs, a hidden jailbreak 'system prompt' in invisible Unicode tag characters, and Tiananmen references, all designed to make AI models refuse to deobfuscate it.
7 min · 1,636 words
Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
Andrew Healey decompiles the 2001 business sim Fast Food Tycoon 2 (Pizza Connection 2) to show how it rendered its detailed isometric cities: the overworld map, lighting, the animated cast of citizens, branch interiors, and the hidden simulation details behind them.
7 min · 1,551 words
Reverse engineering a Beyblade launch tracker
Simone Marzulli describes getting hooked on Beyblade X, then reverse engineering the Beybattle Pass launch tracker: sniffing its Bluetooth traffic, decoding the payloads that record each launch's RPM, and building DiZZi 0.2, an AI companion app inspired by the anime with a spinning 3D bey and voice callouts.
17 min · 3,852 words
Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor's microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how it performs addition and subtraction, including exponent alignment, normalization, rounding and the many special cases for infinities, denormals, unnormals and pseudo-zeros.
25 min · 5,808 words
Sammy Hajhamid (pepsipu) details ns2jb, a software-only tethered jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2 on firmware 23.0.1 that runs arbitrary native code as a sysmodule and as fs, enabling homebrew, game modding and save backups, including how Codex was used in the research harness.
11 min · 2,564 words
Ghidra + CBMC = Assembly Model Checker
Philip Zucker describes ASMC, glue that lifts Ghidra assembly semantics into CBMC's GOTO IR so you can bounded-model-check binaries, with notes on why CBMC's pragmatism still matters in an agentic AI era.
10 min · 2,373 words
The decomp.dev operators announce they are sunsetting the matching-decompilation progress hub launched in 2024, explain what the site achieved for the community, and outline what comes next for the data and tooling.
4 min · 884 words
Using Artificial Intelligence to reverse engineer hardware
Christian F.K. Schaller describes using Claude Code with a Windows VM capturing USB traffic to write a working Linux SANE driver for his Plustek 8200i film scanner within hours, then reusing the setup to patch the kernel and libcamera for his laptop's MIPI camera, and releasing hw-harness, a generic toolkit to help AI agents reverse engineer undocumented hardware.
8 min · 1,760 words
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
Popcar surveys how coding agents are mass-decompiling game binaries, unlocking preservation and modding—while raising awkward questions about IP, security, and what ‘source available’ means when AI can recover readable code at scale.
6 min · 1,336 words
Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
WerWolv revives German point-and-click adventure games from the early 2000s, such as "Findus bei den Mucklas", by reverse engineering the CD-check copy protection that Macromedia Director games shared, patching it so the games run from copies on modern Windows, and notes many similar titles used the same mechanism.
12 min · 2,806 words
Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking With My SonarrPLEASE stop putting skid malware on torrent sites as South Park episodes
A homelab owner traces a South Park episode stuck in Sonarr's queue to a .exe on public trackers with thousands of seeders, then reverse-engineers it: a 118 KB stealer padded with 886 MB of junk to dodge scanners, using encrypted strings and ChaCha20 config to grab browser passwords, crypto wallets, password managers, dev credentials and more, plus practical qBittorrent, Sonarr and Prowlarr defenses.
5 min · 1,237 words
Inside a 1980s filter chip that uses switched capacitors
Ken Shirriff decaps a mysterious 1985 Harris chip, identifies it as a version of the MF10 switched-capacitor filter, and explains under the microscope how rapidly switched capacitors act as resistors, how the state-variable filter and op-amps are built, and how the die's layout maps to the circuit.
20 min · 4,576 words
500+ Billion Tokens Later: Letting AI Agents Decompile A First-Person Shooter
Maurice Heumann describes three months spent orchestrating AI coding agents to produce an accurate, compilable C++ decompilation of a popular first-person shooter, focusing on agent orchestration, infrastructure, harness design and verification rather than the game itself, and estimates 600 to 700 billion tokens were spent.
10 min · 2,206 words
Hijacking the PS5's RTMP Stream
How the PS5 Broadcast RTMP pipeline can be intercepted and redirected: reverse-engineering the stream path and what that unlocks.
4 min · 1,016 words
A story of wifi secrets, UART lockdowns and a damaged flash memory chip
Adepts of 0xCC continues its Eufy research by dissecting the Eufy HomeBase 2: extracting firmware (and damaging part of the flash chip), reverse engineering the algorithm that generates credentials for the OCEAN_XXXXXX management Wi-Fi, reflashing a modified U-Boot to get a UART shell, and the filesystem tweaks needed to run the main binary.
32 min · 7,400 words
Extending Scapy for Hardware Reverse Engineering
VoidStar Security shows how to use Scapy as a binary protocol framework to dissect SPI/QSPI logic-analyzer captures, trace flash erase/program cycles, and reconstruct firmware without desoldering the chip.
24 min · 5,435 words
Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
Cody Ho and a collaborator reverse-engineered Apple's M4 AGX GPU firmware ABI and built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux driver in roughly one month, a process that normally takes years. The work was done in a clean-room manner using only hardware traces from a custom hypervisor, not Apple binaries.
1 min · 299 wordsagent-written
Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing
Chris Jones explains how he got Apple iChat AV audio and video calls working again on Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard: with old network captures and LLM help he reverse engineered the dead SNATMAP NAT-discovery service, wrote a small UDP replacement server, and now one /etc/hosts line points old Macs at his public instance or a self-hosted one.
6 min · 1,373 words
Getting 50 GB/s Back Out of the ANE
Eileen Yoon identifies an RTL performance bug in the Apple M3 Neural Engine where DRAM throughput collapses from 45–60 GB/s to 17–19 GB/s whenever total weight size is an exact multiple of 1 MiB. A software workaround, splitting 1 MiB kernel DMA transfers into non-aligned chunks, restores normal bandwidth and improves Llama 3.2 1B token throughput from 10 to 24 tokens per second.
1 min · 289 wordsagent-written