News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by viraptor on Sunday October 19, 2025 @07:46PM (#45639020)
I wish someone ran a proper study. In my experience it helps mark some patterns you may not be immediately familiar with, like CRC functions/tables. It also does a good job where no thinking is required, like when you have partial information: "for(unk=0; unk<unk2; unk++) { unk3=players[unk]... }" - you know what the names are, you just need to do the boring part. For completely unknown things, it may get more interesting. But I know I'd like to at least see the suggestions. It's a long and boring work to decompile things fully.
Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by thethimble on Sunday October 19, 2025 @10:18PM (#45639676)
Seems like it would be pretty straight forward to fine tune an LLM based on code + asm pairs to help facilitate reverse engineering.
Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by sim7c00 on Monday October 20, 2025 @04:33AM (#45641311)
better add IR too, and all the optimized variants of the ASM for the specified code etc. - its not as straightforward, but that depends also on platform. CISC is generally more wacky than RISC i suppose.

also, a lot of things in stuff like ROMs is about I/O to component in the devices, so you can disassemble and decompile all you want but without the right specifications and context you cannot say what the code does.

so it will also need all specifications of the hardware platform you are running the code on, as well as in this case perhaps even hardware in the catridge etc. (heard those also sometimes have their own chips etc...).

i'd say for 'regular application code' that runs within an OS it might be easier, but still you need to provide a lot of context from the actual execution environment to reason properly what the code actually does? (what does INT 80 run and possibly return anyway, that code is outside of your target binary)

Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by tralarpa on Monday October 20, 2025 @03:25AM (#45640854)
> I wish someone ran a proper study

There are several scientific publications on this. But I don't think the latest models are available as convenient plugins for IDA or Ghidra. Guessing variable and function names are considered as relatively easy nowadays. Types and structures are the challenges now.

Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by HPsquared on Monday October 20, 2025 @04:24AM (#45641250)
Even comments would be useful ("this function might be doing x, or maybe y")
Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by tralarpa on Monday October 20, 2025 @08:18AM (#45643044)
I have never used it, but I think the GhidrAssist plugin does that (and more).
Re:Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project... by pizzalife on Monday October 20, 2025 @12:40PM (#45645906)
I use the following IDA pro MCP plugin for this: https://github.com/mrexodia/ida-pro-mcp