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cpriestyesterday at 8:35 PM1 replyview on HN

For people who've done matching decomps: what burned the most calendar time for you, toolchain freeze or the last 5% of non-matching functions?


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qingcharlesyesterday at 10:38 PM

I just did one last weekend, but it is a game that was clearly written in assembler in the first place (Elite 8088 CGA).

Trying to reconstruct the original build environment that Andy Onions (where are you?) used took some time. It was assembled with 16-bit MASM, but you can't easily run 16-bit exes under 64-bit Windows, so a bit of a kludge to set up DOSbox where the LLMs can push/pull in-and-out of it while being able to drive it enough to execute MASM and read the stderr and output files etc to get a feedback loop going.

Making up plausible function names and branch labels was pretty quick for LLMs.

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