Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in two weeks

Re:Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in ... by banteg on Sunday February 01, 2026 @08:32AM (#46846102)

Crimsonland (2003) is a top-down shooter that shipped as a stripped DirectX 8 binary with zero symbols. I decompiled it with Ghidra, validated behavior with WinDbg and Frida, and rewrote it from scratch in Python/Raylib — 46,800 lines matching the original behavior faithfully. The write-up covers static and runtime analysis, reverse engineering custom asset formats, and the full rewrite process. Code is on GitHub and it's playable now via uvx crimsonland@latest

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Re:Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in ... by zamadatix on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @09:20PM (#46880620)

Very fun use of an agentic loop :). Do you have any info/data about how many tokens this ended up consuming in that time?

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Re:Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in ... by throwayay4929 on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @09:05AM (#46885937)

Wow! What a blast from the past. I remember 13yo spending day after day on this game despite being an avid crpg player those days.

Going to give this a spin after work. Thanks for the work and the writeup!

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Re:Decompiling and rewriting a 2003 game from its binary in ... by AtlasBarfed on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:05AM (#46886697)

.....python? Why a slow scripting lang?

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