Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days(blog.chrislewis.au)
266 points by knackers 14 days ago | 179 comments
tl;dr: Snowboard Kids for N64 was fully decompiled in 84 days, seven times faster than its sequel, thanks to prior experience, community expertise, and heavy use of LLM agents (Codex outperformed Claude and GLM) running in parallel across Git worktrees. Key challenges came from the proprietary IDO 5.3 compiler's aggressive and unpredictable optimizations, which agents helped tackle by documenting quirks in a shared learnings file and leveraging tools like N64 Decomp Workbench. Next steps include documenting the code, porting content to the sequel's engine, and potentially decompiling the PlayStation-exclusive Snowboard Kids Plus.
HN Discussion:
  • Enthusiasm for decomp projects breathing new life into old games
  • LLM-driven workflows enable massive productivity in complex projects like this
  • Questions about legal status and why game companies don't pursue this themselves
  • Sharing personal decomp experiences and applying similar AI-driven approaches
  • Skepticism about the value of recreating code that likely already exists internally