Snowboard Kids Decompiled in 84 Days, Thanks to AI and Community
Decompiling a Nintendo 64 Game in 84 Days
The original Snowboard Kids for Nintendo 64 has been fully decompiled, with all functions matching C implementations that compile to identical machine code. The project took only 84 days, compared to 596 days for its sequel, Snowboard Kids 2. Chris Lewis credits a mix of AI agents, community experts, and improved tooling for the speed. Key factors included using frontier models like Codex, documenting IDO compiler quirks, and leveraging the N64 Decomp Workbench. The decompilation enables better modding and speedrunning insights.
No amount of AI would have been able to replace them.
- jmcgough
I've been absolutely loving the decomp projects that have been coming out lately. Huge props to the writer for this, Snowboard Kids is a real gem.
I'd also encourage people to check out the Legend of Dragoon recomp [1]. It's a real labor of love that has breathed new life into a largely abandoned game. You can play it fully vanilla, or with improved graphics, fixes to cumbersome design choices, bugfixes, etc.
- hombre_fatal
It's pretty amazing what you can do when you embrace LLMs, figure out how to build one high-quality rigorous project with them, and then start working on more projects.
You become a machine with your workflow, once again limited only by your time/energy, tokens, and your discretion on how to spend it.
- amjnsx
I’m surprised the game companies themselves aren’t interested in these projects.
Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam.
Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?
- thebruce87m
Mildly related, but I have been waiting for goldeneye to be decompiled for a while but before that process has finished there is has been a spiritual successor(?) made that has scratched the single-player itch for me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1574480/Agent_64_Spies_Ne...
Worth a look if you want a bit of nostalgia.
- JLO64
> One small but useful improvement was to give every task an explicit deadline and expose that deadline to the agent.
I’m really curious about trying this myself. Recently I’ve been handing off tasks for agents to complete on their own more and more. While their work is acceptable I’ve found them to not only take a long time to complete it, but they often add too much complexity and tests.
- tigen
What's the legal status of these?
Historically there was a notion of "clean room" reimplementation.
These days it seems people translate the actual game code into a different representation of that same code and that makes it open source? Github is full of these.
- cpriest
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?
- jaydayvis
I think Marx is rolling in his grave over the tirelessly expended human to recreate what almost definitely already exists on a floppy sitting in some “IP - Do Not Touch” lock box. But maybe endless puzzles for ever cleverer people is the point of it all.