There are a couple of aspects of the MGS games that have already been discovered - this leak will help expand a lot of details
We know from reverse engineering efforts, and accounts by developers on the PC port, that all of the mainline MGS games used a proprietary scripting system called GCX. This was effectively a Konami fork of TCL - see eg https://github.com/Jayveer/Gcx
Konami built a custom lighting format for at least MGS3 called LA2, and a proprietary audio format called SDT. So far these haven't been reverse engineered - the leak will definitely open up progress there.
My favorite tidbit of the series (but it's in Metal Gear Solid 3): in the torture scene where Volgin interrogates Snake in an attempt to discover who is the spy in his ranks, of all the persons present in the room (and if I got everything right from memory):
- Volgin is not an agent
- Snake is an agent (USA spy)
- The Boss is a double agent (Soviet/USA spy)
- Eva is a triple agent (USA/Soviet/Chinese spy)
- Ocelot is a quadruple agent (GRU/KGB/CIA/Philosophers spy)
And of course, after that Volgin then kills Granin thinking he was the spy, but he wasn't.
I wonder how they must have felt to have coded a 9/11 scenario of Arsenal Gear crashing into the Twin Towers, and then watched it actually happen a few months later.
At least that was cut from the game. I remember that episode from The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files spin-off series, where they stopped the (inside job) hijacking of a commercial airplane from crashing into the twin towers, which aired just a few months before the attack.
I only watched it a few years later, and I had to double check the airing date.
Everyone focuses on that part, but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers? And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?
Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.
We were robbed of the end to that game. I loved it so much and will always wonder what closure I would have been robbed of if they had just completed it.
>Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.
apply this logic to john carpenter movies and they fall apart, too.
Escape from LA is just about as absurd, just less paranormal.
Nuclear powered personal submarines, surfing typhoon waves from California plate shifts, transforming bullet-proof stealth helicopters, emp superweapons and engineered DNA-tailored superbugs ( or atleast the claim of them ) , VR replacing reality, Cuba taking over the democratic world after a theocratic US rescension.
it's just entertainment campiness. When I play a Kojima game I just sort of imagine it internally as a video game equivalent to a John Carpenter movie.
To be clear, I enjoy the games, I've played through MGS2 all the way through twice. It's a good game.
I even enjoy the story, but I view the story as something like a soap opera; a story that is extremely compelling and addictive as you're watching it, but upon turning it off you find yourself questioning what it is you just watched.
A lot of people focus on the whole dynamic of corleone family and their position in American society in the Godfather. But seriously did you see what vito was eating in the restaurant?? Makes no sense
Kojima always has some paranormal activity in his games. And he does like to subvert expectations about what is technology and what is paranormal
> but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers?
MGS always rides the line between "it's actually just tecnology" and "no, it was really supernatural." This is true of Psycho Mantis in MGS1 as well, and The Sorrow in MGS3 is literally a ghost. I assume that Kojima has read up on the Stargate Project and other psychic soldier projects and likes to think about "what if one of those bore fruit?" Anyway, in the context of Fortune, it's a dramatic take on that: her powers were actually a magnetic device planted on her by The Patriots, but ACTUALLY actually she really does have some psychic ability which allows her to fight Ocelot in her final moments.
> And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?
Well, that's actually pretty straightforward. You fought Solidus Snake, who was the third clone of Big Boss, and the "main antagonist" of the game (scare quotes because arguably the Patriots are the real antagonists). At the end of the game, it is revealed that Raiden's girlfriend Rosemary is a) real, b) alive, c) pregnant and d) being held captive by the Patriots, and they task Raiden with killing Solidus if he ever wants to see her again. Why a sword fight? I dunno, some things we must simply chalk up to "because it's cool."
If you want to dive further into who Solidus was, yes, he was also a pseudo-father to Raiden, in the sense that Raiden was raised as a child soldier and Solidus was (at the time) his commander. Solidus was President during the events of MGS1 under the name George Sears, but by MGS2 he's leading the Sons of Liberty as part of his anti-Patriots plot. Unfortunately, Ocelot is still working as a Patriots double-agent at this point, and Raiden's involvement is in turn orchestrated by the Patriots, so it doesn't quite work and the whole operation is manipulated from the start.
Yep, it's funny when people get too serious and completely ignore the rule of cool.
Like you have a giant bipedal (well... most of the times) autonomous robot armed with a nuclear tipped missiles launched by a railgun which can destory the whole countries ... and the said robot is defeated by shoot-out against a human.
That stuff is just silly mostly-self-aware camp to keep the setting entertaining, don't overthink it. Everybody already knows and acknowledges that the series is absurd.
During the mainline of the game you are an anti terrorist specialist sent to rescue the president from a bunch of stereotypical mad bombers
Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic
However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.
Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.
When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad
Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!
I am pretty sure I am going to file this away for some copypastas when I want to confuse someone. I’ll just have ChatGPT or whatever swap out some words.
It's not really "random", there is a coherent story (and a moral to that story) underneath all the weirdness and you'll sometimes forget how crazy it's gotten because your current objective tends to make sense (ex: "defuse the bombs").
But all MGS games are basically playable Kojima manifestos with sci-fi trappings. The actual minute-to-minute gameplay for them is really, really good so even if you don't dig the story they're worth playing.
The previous poster is right that MGS4 does clear a lot of this up. But MGS4 also slams more weirdness and callbacks to the previous games on top of it.
Hmm, interesting, thanks. I played MGS 1 when it came out, multiple times, as I liked it a lot. I don't remember it being so weird, but maybe I didn't pay enough attention to the story.
The first one gets a bit goofy with the evil twin stuff, and the unintentionally funny dialog like "Do you think love can bloom on the battlefield???", but certainly doesn't go nearly as off the rails as the second one.
I've only completed the first three, but at least in those, the stories get progressively off the rails and weird as they go on, especially MGS2.
It's one of those weird things, because the stories are kind of incomprehensible, but they're compelling in the same way that a soap opera is; while you're watching and playing, the story is very addictive and it doesn't feel that confusing as it's going on. There are even evil twins!
The moment I turn the games off, I kind of start thinking "....what the hell actually happened there?".
They do try and have a moral associated with it (though they do one of my pet peeves and just outright explain the themes they're going for at the end), so it's not completely trivial.
The games are a lot of fun, and they are certainly worth playing through in an emulator or something. I've played through the first MGS three times, and the second one twice, and I thoroughly enjoyed them both times, even rewatching the story unfold.
Welcome to Metal Gear Solid. Half the fun is creating a coherent narrative out of the sheer number of random postmodern happenings. You should see MGSV. Its entire existence is an attempt to connect the series back to the original excuse plots of the original Metal Gear games from the 80s.
Kojima knew that everyone had played MGS1 and were highly anticipating the sequel, so he deliberately trolled them all by baiting their expectations then subverting every single one by doing the opposite of what people wanted him to do. And he also spawned a lot of AI memes along the way.
Being the Vita/360 versions makes this much more usable. I would be having a little panic attack if I had to go back to working on PS2 only code. I mean you came to like the thing but I'm convinced it was a form of digital Stockholm syndrome.
I've only played the original PlayStation 2 release, but wasn't the PS2 release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance the version with the most content? I'd take a leak of that one over the other versions.
Legacy is pre-bedrock and it’s NOT decompiled; some consider it to be the “last good” version of Minecraft that wasn’t Java - and perhaps could be used to do something interesting on non-jvm platforms.
Decompiled code is great, but having access to the “real” code gives you more insight into design decisions and directions.
In any sane world not completely captured by corporate interests, the game would already be in the public domain after 25 years. The harm is non-existent.
> Clearly if it was able to be leaked it already was being preserved
Preserved by whom? Many leaks are done by old or ex-employees who quietly kept a shall we say 'backup' of their work. More than one 'official' re-release has been rumored to be an embarrassed company quietly filing the serial numbers off a rogue leak because they realized way too late that their archival practices were inadequate.
What this article is about is that Nintendo used a format standard in the emulation community for the ROM, it's possible they downloaded it but it's not like there's some "downloaded from ROMZ-ZONE.RU" watermark in there. It has been revealed in leaks that Nintendo has an internal ROM vault of pretty much everything ever released on their systems.
Also how WarioWare: Smooth Moves shows their in-house developers using third-party emulators to source graphics for their first-party nostalgia bait: https://tcrf.net/WarioWare:_Smooth_Moves#Punch-Out (not said derisively; I love WarioWare!)
A correct ROM packaged using the emulation community's standard file format will exactly match a pirated copy. There is no story here. After the article came out, Nintendo even created their own incompatible ROM packaging format just to spite that article.
If someone breaks into a warehouse and makes off with a pallet of cartridges, and then those carts are recovered, would it be strange if Nintendo resold those carts? It's their property at the end of the day.
Aside from that thought exercise, like many "internet facts" this one also might not be true, and repeating it doesn't really help either "side."
They were only "caught" using the .NES header which is a public standard that many NES emulators implement. There is no evidence that they used a pirated ROM.
It’s, what, 25 years old? There have been many sequels, prequels, remastering. The economic benefits of this IP are largely exhausted; that it is now leaked to the commons isn’t an alarming thing.
Recompilation efforts raise the bar for future re-releases, and incentivize proper remaster efforts like MGS Delta instead of the half-assed Master collection. I would love to see Konami thrive as a company and get more people interested in MGS, but their recent re-releases don't deserve to be priced at $60. Their monopoly of the source code feels like an existential threat to both future preservation and high-quality MGS remakes, it's healthier for Konami to simply let it go at this point.
It is also trivial to emulate these days, so to me I don't see any potential lost sales. Worst case it reveals some mostly already suspected story details that were cut or left unstated in the final versions. MGS4 might still have some value because you need expensive hardware to emulate decently and it isn't perfect still. But a 15 year old computer can emulate MGS2 better than it originally ran on the xbox.
There is not only one copy. There are many copies under Konami's control. It is also fully up to Konami if they want it to eventually become public or if they just want to delete it and have it never revealed. That is the decision that they themselves have the power to make and leaks like this is stripping them of their creative rights over distribution.
> That is the decision that they themselves have the power to make and leaks like this is stripping them of their creative rights over distribution
Fuck yeah, that's exactly why this leak is a great thing. It should belong to everybody. “Konami” as an entity is not even comprised of the same people that worked there when MGS2 was created. Stop personifying corporations as singular entities.
You are entitled to think that people's hard work should belong to everyone after X many years. Stealing it is not something to celebrate as it is a deeply malicious action. Konami being made up of different people does not mean that they don't own still own it and have control over it. While archival sounds like a noble goal, in practice it is an excuse used by people who want to steal copyrighted works and take advantage of them. Konami by definition is a legal person (法人) so I do not see anything wrong with personification of it.
You have it precisely backwards. Culture belonging to the people is the default, natural state, and copyright is an unnatural legal fiction that should only be tolerated insofar at it produces a net positive in terms of promotion of the arts and sciences.
Unfortunately, the whole intellectual property concept has been co-opted by big business for rent-seeking.
I don't think the Konami execs are at a board meeting saying, "we can't fund another Metal Gear sequel because it will just become public domain in 20 years."
Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't. It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have. Copies of the game have been released for people to play to directly experience the game.
>unnatural legal fiction
It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created. If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
> Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't.
> It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created.
Intelectual property is an oxymoron, and no oxymoron can be natural. Only scarce things can be property. Making non-scarce things (e.g. binary code) act as property is conflict-seeking behavior that often results in the violation of real ownership of others.
> It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have.
NDA do not protect IPs. While they restrict the flow of information, they are still contracts, and bounded by their limits as such.
> If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
Yes, someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design on the basis that they own their own pendant materials. To prevent that is to violate their private property rights and, in some cases, their right to live.
Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership. Intellectual property is a subcategory of property. It isn't an oxymoron.
>NDA do not protect IPs.
But they do indicate intent.
>someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design
I was talking about the physical object. They may think it is of such importance that it should live in a museum instead of as your private property. Other people believe that a museum could preserve it better and they think they know how best the pendant should be used than its actual owner.
> Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership.
The legally and ethically relevant concept of ownership is about dealing with mutual exclusivity of material resources and avoiding its conflicts. Abudant things, in this context, do not have mutual exclusivity and, as such, are not ownable in a natural sense.
> But they do indicate intent.
And?
> I was talking about the physical object.
Sure, but we are talking about IPs, not real property, so I fail to see how this example is relevant.
> While archival sounds like a noble goal, in practice it is an excuse used by people who want to steal copyrighted works and take advantage of them
“Take advantage” of them by restoring cut content, fixing bugs, and porting them to platforms that Konami never would. I am very excited for MGS2 to be taken advantage of.
> A thief would be excited to eat the food they stole
I don't concede that the act of sharing this code is stealing, of course. The act of helping one's fellow man is a good thing. You've made your stance clear, and the very cogent and fairly conclusive arguments people have made against your stance don't seem to land, and I have no interest in repeating that exercise (and neither do you, I'm sure).
But this phrase stood out to me, and in particular that you would choose food as an example. You could've used any other example, like a new hat, or a baseball bat, a tricycle, a mirror, and so on. But you chose food, something people need to survive. Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you? What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
>Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you?
It is not ambiguous in the least. To me part of being human is being able to ignore one's natural instincts and make one's own actions. If someone is stealing food either they are no better than an animal, so they should be locked up like one, or they are antisocial and want to commit malicious acts in which they should be punished.
>What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
To me this clearly is also wrong. Either the father needs to be working more so they can afford them, or the mother should create them herself instead of resulting to stealing them. The age of the mother makes no difference as basic harmful behavior like stealing is taught and understood at a very young age.
Copyrights were only intended to be secure for a _limited_ time. Originally 20 years. Konami has been granted at least 2 decades of FBI backed security of their property. I'd say they got a plenty good deal and have nothing to complain about here.
This is a Japanese game and Japan originally had 30 years of copyright. You also can't ignore that the amount of time was extended before the game came out.
Does the US enforce Japanese copyrights? Or did Konami also register it with the Library of Congress so it had protection here?
I can completely ignore the time it "was extended." Copyright exists from the time you've registered it. You can play mental gymnastics here if you like but the law is particularly cut and dry.
The law isn't something that exists in a vacuum. It's meant to convey the will of the people. Show me where the will of the people demands corporations get copyright protections longer than a human lifetime?
No consumer is entitled to play a game. They are free to go find another game to play and there are millions of other games out there that they could legally access and play.
I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code.
I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine.
Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com and news tower; thedailycheat.com (.com domains are only $10 so i figured why not).
You can do this with any game i’ve found. Older games work best due to the forced simplicity of the source code though.
There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp
I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.
I don't think it's impossible, but it would take a lot of time and a lot of money; likely more time than good enough models have been commercially available.
I have been working on an incremental decompilation-based reimplementation (basically how OpenRCT2 was done) of Worms Armageddon for the past 2 months with a lot of help from LLM tools; primarily Claude Code and Ghidra MCP. I've worked on it almost every day, reaching Claude Code Max 5x's 5 hour session limit multiple times every day. Suffice to say as a software rendered, sprite-based 90s PC game, Worms Armageddon is several orders of magnitude simpler than MGS2. Despite that, I think it will be 2-3 more months of work before I can compile a fully independent version of the game.
This is despite the game being an almost ideal candidate for automated RE, as it uses deterministic game logic with built-in checksum checks in replays and multiplayer. I've downloaded all the speedruns I could find for the game (as replay files) and I've retrofitted the replay system into a massively parallel test framework, which simulates over 600 games in about 30 seconds. So Claude can port all game logic independently without much need for manual testing; the replay tests can almost guarantee perfect correctness.
MGS2 doesn't have anything like that, so every ported function requires extensive manual testing. Even with LLM tools, an accurate decomp could take years (unless you're willing spend thousands of $currency per month on it).
This is really cool! Your process is compelling, and your choice of game is excellent. I'd like to read a long blog post about your entire journey from the beginning to a working binary once you get there.
As it happens I do have the habit of writing very long blog posts - though none on OpenWA so far. The OpenWA readme file serves as a bit of an introduction, though it's already a month old.
Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.
Having followed his bsky during his announcement, he started off per-emptively dissing on his haters that... didn't even exist yet. Constantly posting memes about how everyone was dissing him and how AI was totally superior (and then posting his angry sessions with Claude when it got something wrong) when most other users were just "that's cool man". The thing that made him quit bsky was a (now-deleted) thread someone posted criticizing the weird crash-outs. I think he was more... normal about the whole thing, people would have received the project quite a bit more positively.
Decompilation to C (and even C++!) has been done automatically for 2-3 decades at least. I am not sure what has changed in recent years other than people playing fast and loose with copyright (and GitHub allowing it, likely because their LLMs also stand to benefit). Introducing LLMs here is only going to introduce errors, delays and likely push you away from a reliable result.
The challenge here is readability. Reading the TP source leak you link I think it's even behind the current state of the art, as it's barely above assembly. This is where I suspect even the smallest of LLMs may help, since you don't care that much if it introduces errors.
>Decompilation to C (and even C++!) has been done automatically for 2-3 decades at least.
Only in a very rudimentary sense and definitely not in a working compilation (much less binary equivalent) sense. LLMs have turned this from a gimmick for static analysis into something that actually works pretty well for recompilation projects.
> Only in a very rudimentary sense and definitely not in a working compilation (much less binary equivalent) sense.
Working is the easy part; the hard part is getting something that classifies as readable C. LLMs do not really help reach the "working compilation" part but benefit from it.
We are way past "working compilation" when it comes to LLMs. They are already really good at writing readable, compliable code. The big problem with LLMs is making sure the output binary actually does what you wanted it to do. But if you define the goal not merely as instructions in a vague, unspecific human language and rather as recreating a given set of binary instructions after compilation, this big drawback goes away. So in a sense they are better suited for recompilation projects than for developing new applications.
My point is that we have been past the "working compilation" way before LLMs, and I do not think anything in LLMs help with it, at best agents use these tools with the same efficiency. I disagree that they're good at writing compilable code, but agree on the readable part.
Which decompiler reliably produced working, high level C/C++ from assembly? I would have loved to use this thing you are describing here 15 years ago. Compilation is inherently lossy, so any system that could have given you this would have needed pretty heavy LLM-like features anyways.
>I disagree that they're good at writing compilable code
That was never part of the discussion, because as explained several times now it is irrelevant in this case. The existence of the original binary means all you need to do is match up things, which can be automated completely.
Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher level approximation that matches the flow/logic/structure - but the code will never be anywhere near close to the original source code. I could write the same C++ program in 3 different ways and get identical assembly, how do you go back to the exact source? The answer is that you don't.
Here's the same simple program, written in 3 different ways, producing identical binary compatible code: https://godbolt.org/z/qWrc8fEnn
How does the AI know whether it should produce back the snippet #1, #2 or #3? It does not. It cannot.
Who cares? Who said anything about recreating the exact code? You will get usable, compilable, and surprisingly readable source code, in your language of choice, that yields the functional equivalent of the binary.
Barring obvious edge cases that could show up but don't usually, like intentional race conditions. Timing is the one area where things get iffy.
That is quite incredible if that is true. Need to read a bit into that. Can you point towards relevant literature/examples? Also: please see my questions in the comment to your other reply
That's pre-2026 thinking. At this point, with the ability to lash IDA or similar tools to an agentic harness, there is no longer any such thing as a closed-source binary.
I’m interested in how LLMs handle obfuscated code. Throw LLM with IDA MCP at EasyAntiCheat_EOS.sys or the like (as the most common examples of heavily obfuscated software) and see how far they can get.
It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.
>and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine
lot of people claiming this the end result is the AI downloading an emulator and rom
> It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.
There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc.
Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc.
De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it.
It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.
There's so much irony in hyping up a machine that launders other people's work, and the way that's done is also giving it credit for other people's work that it had nothing to do with. You can't make this up.
It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game.
Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range.
The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view.
Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay.
It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.
I’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.
There are a couple of aspects of the MGS games that have already been discovered - this leak will help expand a lot of details
We know from reverse engineering efforts, and accounts by developers on the PC port, that all of the mainline MGS games used a proprietary scripting system called GCX. This was effectively a Konami fork of TCL - see eg https://github.com/Jayveer/Gcx
Konami built a custom lighting format for at least MGS3 called LA2, and a proprietary audio format called SDT. So far these haven't been reverse engineered - the leak will definitely open up progress there.
Maybe with the source code, I'd be able to figure out what the hell happened in the last ~2 hours of the game.
My favorite tidbit of the series (but it's in Metal Gear Solid 3): in the torture scene where Volgin interrogates Snake in an attempt to discover who is the spy in his ranks, of all the persons present in the room (and if I got everything right from memory):
- Volgin is not an agent
- Snake is an agent (USA spy)
- The Boss is a double agent (Soviet/USA spy)
- Eva is a triple agent (USA/Soviet/Chinese spy)
- Ocelot is a quadruple agent (GRU/KGB/CIA/Philosophers spy)
And of course, after that Volgin then kills Granin thinking he was the spy, but he wasn't.
Not much, just accurately predicted the next 30 years exactly
I wonder how they must have felt to have coded a 9/11 scenario of Arsenal Gear crashing into the Twin Towers, and then watched it actually happen a few months later.
This was cut from the game but is still in the source code leak, just commented out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNSPx-oRV60
Also note that the source code was leaked on April 30th :p
At least that was cut from the game. I remember that episode from The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files spin-off series, where they stopped the (inside job) hijacking of a commercial airplane from crashing into the twin towers, which aired just a few months before the attack.
I only watched it a few years later, and I had to double check the airing date.
Here's another interesting one. I think they cut a scene from a movie too.
https://youtu.be/Ozz8uxW733Q?t=81
Everyone focuses on that part, but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers? And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?
Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.
> but the actual story is incomprehensible.
You're almost there. Double the convolutions in your post and you'll finally understand Kojima.
And yes, that chick really does have to be topless, its not sexism. See, she breathes through her skin. Thats why she's such a good sniper
We were robbed of the end to that game. I loved it so much and will always wonder what closure I would have been robbed of if they had just completed it.
Mandated last generation console support gimped the game's scope too... It pains me to imagine what could have been.
>Yeah I know, sure, fake information on the internet. It's so prescient I guess, but the actual story is incomprehensible.
apply this logic to john carpenter movies and they fall apart, too.
Escape from LA is just about as absurd, just less paranormal.
Nuclear powered personal submarines, surfing typhoon waves from California plate shifts, transforming bullet-proof stealth helicopters, emp superweapons and engineered DNA-tailored superbugs ( or atleast the claim of them ) , VR replacing reality, Cuba taking over the democratic world after a theocratic US rescension.
it's just entertainment campiness. When I play a Kojima game I just sort of imagine it internally as a video game equivalent to a John Carpenter movie.
To be clear, I enjoy the games, I've played through MGS2 all the way through twice. It's a good game.
I even enjoy the story, but I view the story as something like a soap opera; a story that is extremely compelling and addictive as you're watching it, but upon turning it off you find yourself questioning what it is you just watched.
>Cuba taking over the democratic world after a theocratic US rescension. it's just entertainment campiness
I don't know, this is starting to hit to close to home.
Man, now I have the music of The Duke arriving in my head.
Thanks!
edit: the soundtrack sure was a banger at the time
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eX_t63eZqyk
Well you see it was all really the La Le Lu Le Lo, who turned into the Patriots (iirc). All is revealed if you play through MGSV.
I'm just kidding. That game doesn't have an ending.
A lot of people focus on the whole dynamic of corleone family and their position in American society in the Godfather. But seriously did you see what vito was eating in the restaurant?? Makes no sense
Kojima always has some paranormal activity in his games. And he does like to subvert expectations about what is technology and what is paranormal
Veal doesn’t make sense?
> but what the hell was with the girl that could repel bullets but it turns out that it was magnets but actually maybe she does have powers?
MGS always rides the line between "it's actually just tecnology" and "no, it was really supernatural." This is true of Psycho Mantis in MGS1 as well, and The Sorrow in MGS3 is literally a ghost. I assume that Kojima has read up on the Stargate Project and other psychic soldier projects and likes to think about "what if one of those bore fruit?" Anyway, in the context of Fortune, it's a dramatic take on that: her powers were actually a magnetic device planted on her by The Patriots, but ACTUALLY actually she really does have some psychic ability which allows her to fight Ocelot in her final moments.
> And what about the weird thing where you start sword fighting your father/president/clone?
Well, that's actually pretty straightforward. You fought Solidus Snake, who was the third clone of Big Boss, and the "main antagonist" of the game (scare quotes because arguably the Patriots are the real antagonists). At the end of the game, it is revealed that Raiden's girlfriend Rosemary is a) real, b) alive, c) pregnant and d) being held captive by the Patriots, and they task Raiden with killing Solidus if he ever wants to see her again. Why a sword fight? I dunno, some things we must simply chalk up to "because it's cool."
If you want to dive further into who Solidus was, yes, he was also a pseudo-father to Raiden, in the sense that Raiden was raised as a child soldier and Solidus was (at the time) his commander. Solidus was President during the events of MGS1 under the name George Sears, but by MGS2 he's leading the Sons of Liberty as part of his anti-Patriots plot. Unfortunately, Ocelot is still working as a Patriots double-agent at this point, and Raiden's involvement is in turn orchestrated by the Patriots, so it doesn't quite work and the whole operation is manipulated from the start.
Yep, it's funny when people get too serious and completely ignore the rule of cool.
Like you have a giant bipedal (well... most of the times) autonomous robot armed with a nuclear tipped missiles launched by a railgun which can destory the whole countries ... and the said robot is defeated by shoot-out against a human.
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what is incomprehensible about her actually having paranormal powers
That stuff is just silly mostly-self-aware camp to keep the setting entertaining, don't overthink it. Everybody already knows and acknowledges that the series is absurd.
Including the cardboard boxes: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/
Surveillance states and mass media manipulation are a staple of sci-fi. Those topics were particularly common around that time too. E.g., The Matrix.
Dunkey MGS Explained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLiLRVeaZA
That’s great, now do kingdom hearts
Dunkey Kingdom Hearts explained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o1ieehttdA
Holy shit
A bit longer, but a classic:
A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts
https://youtu.be/tjiHufVEc7g?si=FoD3TxqDhkAV3sbe
I can’t believe I watched all that, and KH3. I still understand nothing.
What? He completely misses Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Luckily that's pretty straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41v3L0zCkNY
Kojima saw the writing on the wall so speak, and told us what the future held in a series of metaphors and dense monologues.
Try the classic analyses: https://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/ and https://www.aumaan.org/form1/tus1/features/dreaming1.htm.
https://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM_TOC.htm
I need scissors, 61!
Must have been having a stroke...
What did actually happen? I haven't played the game.
During the mainline of the game you are an anti terrorist specialist sent to rescue the president from a bunch of stereotypical mad bombers
Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic
However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.
Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.
When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad
Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!
It makes a lot more sense in MGS4
I am pretty sure I am going to file this away for some copypastas when I want to confuse someone. I’ll just have ChatGPT or whatever swap out some words.
Thank you, my friend.
> It makes a lot more sense in MGS4
I played that game and it did not.
To be clear, great game, banging music and design, and the multiplayer was a ton of fun. 10/10, do recommend.
But the story was "wtf?"
...what?
I watched the Dunkey video linked elsewhere and thought he was making it up, he wasn't? The whole story is just random stuff happening?
It's not really "random", there is a coherent story (and a moral to that story) underneath all the weirdness and you'll sometimes forget how crazy it's gotten because your current objective tends to make sense (ex: "defuse the bombs").
But all MGS games are basically playable Kojima manifestos with sci-fi trappings. The actual minute-to-minute gameplay for them is really, really good so even if you don't dig the story they're worth playing.
The previous poster is right that MGS4 does clear a lot of this up. But MGS4 also slams more weirdness and callbacks to the previous games on top of it.
they're ninja-fantasy stories with Tom Clancy future-war trappings
everything about them makes sense when you think of them as Naruto or Onimusha but with a gun fetish.
Hmm, interesting, thanks. I played MGS 1 when it came out, multiple times, as I liked it a lot. I don't remember it being so weird, but maybe I didn't pay enough attention to the story.
The first one gets a bit goofy with the evil twin stuff, and the unintentionally funny dialog like "Do you think love can bloom on the battlefield???", but certainly doesn't go nearly as off the rails as the second one.
I've only completed the first three, but at least in those, the stories get progressively off the rails and weird as they go on, especially MGS2.
It's one of those weird things, because the stories are kind of incomprehensible, but they're compelling in the same way that a soap opera is; while you're watching and playing, the story is very addictive and it doesn't feel that confusing as it's going on. There are even evil twins!
The moment I turn the games off, I kind of start thinking "....what the hell actually happened there?".
They do try and have a moral associated with it (though they do one of my pet peeves and just outright explain the themes they're going for at the end), so it's not completely trivial.
The games are a lot of fun, and they are certainly worth playing through in an emulator or something. I've played through the first MGS three times, and the second one twice, and I thoroughly enjoyed them both times, even rewatching the story unfold.
Just play the games. They're good fun.
> The whole story is just random stuff happening?
Welcome to Metal Gear Solid. Half the fun is creating a coherent narrative out of the sheer number of random postmodern happenings. You should see MGSV. Its entire existence is an attempt to connect the series back to the original excuse plots of the original Metal Gear games from the 80s.
Kojima knew that everyone had played MGS1 and were highly anticipating the sequel, so he deliberately trolled them all by baiting their expectations then subverting every single one by doing the opposite of what people wanted him to do. And he also spawned a lot of AI memes along the way.
Thread:
https://boards.4chan.org/vr/thread/12541637/metal-gear-solid...
The re-constructed URL:
https://pixeldrain.com/l/aPyoCBax
Mirror from the thread in case the Pixeldrain link does not work: https://gofile.io/d/Jf1tX8
Alt download link from thread:
https://buzzheavier.com/i1f03py9rw4g
Thread archive:
https://desuarchive.org/vr/thread/12541637
very thanks!
Being the Vita/360 versions makes this much more usable. I would be having a little panic attack if I had to go back to working on PS2 only code. I mean you came to like the thing but I'm convinced it was a form of digital Stockholm syndrome.
I've only played the original PlayStation 2 release, but wasn't the PS2 release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance the version with the most content? I'd take a leak of that one over the other versions.
I think what they're saying is the PS2 was notoriously hard to program for.
Good thing they had a 25 year head start on bringing MGS2 to market.
Is it buildable for consoles? I assume it doesn't include the official SDKs for PS Vita and such?
Now do Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge!
The most important videogame ever made.
Minecraft Legacy Console Edition apparently leaked on 4chan recently, too: https://github.com/MCLCE/MinecraftConsoles
Almost no coverage on HN or mainstream media though. Surprising, considering the popularity of this game.
Trying to explain why a Minecraft Legacy leak is worth anything when we have decompiled Java takes too long.
i'll bite: explain
Legacy is pre-bedrock and it’s NOT decompiled; some consider it to be the “last good” version of Minecraft that wasn’t Java - and perhaps could be used to do something interesting on non-jvm platforms.
Decompiled code is great, but having access to the “real” code gives you more insight into design decisions and directions.
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In any sane world not completely captured by corporate interests, the game would already be in the public domain after 25 years. The harm is non-existent.
Until someone rebuilds it with a Thomas the Tank Engine mod.
> Clearly if it was able to be leaked it already was being preserved
Preserved by whom? Many leaks are done by old or ex-employees who quietly kept a shall we say 'backup' of their work. More than one 'official' re-release has been rumored to be an embarrassed company quietly filing the serial numbers off a rogue leak because they realized way too late that their archival practices were inadequate.
Anti-emulation Nintendo was caught repacking a pirated ROM.
https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-...
What this article is about is that Nintendo used a format standard in the emulation community for the ROM, it's possible they downloaded it but it's not like there's some "downloaded from ROMZ-ZONE.RU" watermark in there. It has been revealed in leaks that Nintendo has an internal ROM vault of pretty much everything ever released on their systems.
Also how WarioWare: Smooth Moves shows their in-house developers using third-party emulators to source graphics for their first-party nostalgia bait: https://tcrf.net/WarioWare:_Smooth_Moves#Punch-Out (not said derisively; I love WarioWare!)
A correct ROM packaged using the emulation community's standard file format will exactly match a pirated copy. There is no story here. After the article came out, Nintendo even created their own incompatible ROM packaging format just to spite that article.
> Nintendo even created their own incompatible ROM packaging format just to spite that article
Leave it to Nintendo to innovate entirely new reasons for people to hate them. It's like they have an entire department dedicated to it.
Never ever did Nintendo distribute an iNES-format ROM with a "DiskDude!" header
If someone breaks into a warehouse and makes off with a pallet of cartridges, and then those carts are recovered, would it be strange if Nintendo resold those carts? It's their property at the end of the day.
Aside from that thought exercise, like many "internet facts" this one also might not be true, and repeating it doesn't really help either "side."
https://medium.com/@AberrantWolf/mario-illegal-roms-and-medi...
There’s still no proof they pirated the ROM
They were only "caught" using the .NES header which is a public standard that many NES emulators implement. There is no evidence that they used a pirated ROM.
It’s, what, 25 years old? There have been many sequels, prequels, remastering. The economic benefits of this IP are largely exhausted; that it is now leaked to the commons isn’t an alarming thing.
The game just had an update to support the Switch 2 only 2 months ago. It is still being used commercially.
Konami willing, they'll drag the IP to their grave. Lest we forget MGS3's first remaster... for Pachinko parlors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsJ4QgBpQN8
Recompilation efforts raise the bar for future re-releases, and incentivize proper remaster efforts like MGS Delta instead of the half-assed Master collection. I would love to see Konami thrive as a company and get more people interested in MGS, but their recent re-releases don't deserve to be priced at $60. Their monopoly of the source code feels like an existential threat to both future preservation and high-quality MGS remakes, it's healthier for Konami to simply let it go at this point.
Do you think this leak will harm sales of the Switch 2 version?
Yes I do think it will harm the sales, but it doesn't matter if it does or doesn't as releasing this goes against the wishes of the copyright owner.
It is also trivial to emulate these days, so to me I don't see any potential lost sales. Worst case it reveals some mostly already suspected story details that were cut or left unstated in the final versions. MGS4 might still have some value because you need expensive hardware to emulate decently and it isn't perfect still. But a 15 year old computer can emulate MGS2 better than it originally ran on the xbox.
> But a 15 year old computer can emulate MGS2 better than it originally ran on the xbox.
And you don't even need to emulate it because there was an official Windows port... well you probably need to emulate Windows XP to make it even run.
Crowdsourcing the preservation means the one UND ONLY ONE copy can't be destroyed by fire, flood, disk failure, ransomware, whatever else.
There is not only one copy. There are many copies under Konami's control. It is also fully up to Konami if they want it to eventually become public or if they just want to delete it and have it never revealed. That is the decision that they themselves have the power to make and leaks like this is stripping them of their creative rights over distribution.
> That is the decision that they themselves have the power to make and leaks like this is stripping them of their creative rights over distribution
Fuck yeah, that's exactly why this leak is a great thing. It should belong to everybody. “Konami” as an entity is not even comprised of the same people that worked there when MGS2 was created. Stop personifying corporations as singular entities.
You are entitled to think that people's hard work should belong to everyone after X many years. Stealing it is not something to celebrate as it is a deeply malicious action. Konami being made up of different people does not mean that they don't own still own it and have control over it. While archival sounds like a noble goal, in practice it is an excuse used by people who want to steal copyrighted works and take advantage of them. Konami by definition is a legal person (法人) so I do not see anything wrong with personification of it.
You have it precisely backwards. Culture belonging to the people is the default, natural state, and copyright is an unnatural legal fiction that should only be tolerated insofar at it produces a net positive in terms of promotion of the arts and sciences. Unfortunately, the whole intellectual property concept has been co-opted by big business for rent-seeking. I don't think the Konami execs are at a board meeting saying, "we can't fund another Metal Gear sequel because it will just become public domain in 20 years."
Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't. It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have. Copies of the game have been released for people to play to directly experience the game.
>unnatural legal fiction
It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created. If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
> Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't.
> It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created.
Intelectual property is an oxymoron, and no oxymoron can be natural. Only scarce things can be property. Making non-scarce things (e.g. binary code) act as property is conflict-seeking behavior that often results in the violation of real ownership of others.
> It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have.
NDA do not protect IPs. While they restrict the flow of information, they are still contracts, and bounded by their limits as such.
> If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
Yes, someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design on the basis that they own their own pendant materials. To prevent that is to violate their private property rights and, in some cases, their right to live.
>Only scarce things can be property.
Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership. Intellectual property is a subcategory of property. It isn't an oxymoron.
>NDA do not protect IPs.
But they do indicate intent.
>someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design
I was talking about the physical object. They may think it is of such importance that it should live in a museum instead of as your private property. Other people believe that a museum could preserve it better and they think they know how best the pendant should be used than its actual owner.
> Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership.
The legally and ethically relevant concept of ownership is about dealing with mutual exclusivity of material resources and avoiding its conflicts. Abudant things, in this context, do not have mutual exclusivity and, as such, are not ownable in a natural sense.
> But they do indicate intent.
And?
> I was talking about the physical object.
Sure, but we are talking about IPs, not real property, so I fail to see how this example is relevant.
> While archival sounds like a noble goal, in practice it is an excuse used by people who want to steal copyrighted works and take advantage of them
“Take advantage” of them by restoring cut content, fixing bugs, and porting them to platforms that Konami never would. I am very excited for MGS2 to be taken advantage of.
A thief would be excited to eat the food they stole. Taking's other stuff for free always looks great from the thief's perspective.
> A thief would be excited to eat the food they stole
I don't concede that the act of sharing this code is stealing, of course. The act of helping one's fellow man is a good thing. You've made your stance clear, and the very cogent and fairly conclusive arguments people have made against your stance don't seem to land, and I have no interest in repeating that exercise (and neither do you, I'm sure).
But this phrase stood out to me, and in particular that you would choose food as an example. You could've used any other example, like a new hat, or a baseball bat, a tricycle, a mirror, and so on. But you chose food, something people need to survive. Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you? What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
>Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you?
It is not ambiguous in the least. To me part of being human is being able to ignore one's natural instincts and make one's own actions. If someone is stealing food either they are no better than an animal, so they should be locked up like one, or they are antisocial and want to commit malicious acts in which they should be punished.
>What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
To me this clearly is also wrong. Either the father needs to be working more so they can afford them, or the mother should create them herself instead of resulting to stealing them. The age of the mother makes no difference as basic harmful behavior like stealing is taught and understood at a very young age.
copyright infringement is awesome
shrugs Not always.
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Copyrights were only intended to be secure for a _limited_ time. Originally 20 years. Konami has been granted at least 2 decades of FBI backed security of their property. I'd say they got a plenty good deal and have nothing to complain about here.
This is a Japanese game and Japan originally had 30 years of copyright. You also can't ignore that the amount of time was extended before the game came out.
Does the US enforce Japanese copyrights? Or did Konami also register it with the Library of Congress so it had protection here?
I can completely ignore the time it "was extended." Copyright exists from the time you've registered it. You can play mental gymnastics here if you like but the law is particularly cut and dry.
The law isn't something that exists in a vacuum. It's meant to convey the will of the people. Show me where the will of the people demands corporations get copyright protections longer than a human lifetime?
> Does the US enforce Japanese copyrights
Yes. Due to the Berne Convention.
> did Konami also register it with the Library of Congress so it had protection here
I don't think that was required in 2001. Everything copyrightable is automatically protected in the US for years now.
because intellectual property laws are inherently worthy of respect and they are never used against consumers ever
No consumer is entitled to play a game. They are free to go find another game to play and there are millions of other games out there that they could legally access and play.
No corporation should be entitled to 200 year monopolies on what amounts to bits of information.
It's been twenty years. The game should be in the public domain.
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> It is shameful that such a publication tries and celebrate copyright infringement like this.
Oh no.
Anyway.
I wonder if it’s a real leak or just an agent recreation of the source from machine code.
I’ve been having fun lately with agents and decompilation. You can literally point them at any game and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine.
Some proof: i made online save game editors for jagged alliance 3; grandcheaten.com and news tower; thedailycheat.com (.com domains are only $10 so i figured why not).
You can do this with any game i’ve found. Older games work best due to the forced simplicity of the source code though.
There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp
I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.
I don't think it's impossible, but it would take a lot of time and a lot of money; likely more time than good enough models have been commercially available.
I have been working on an incremental decompilation-based reimplementation (basically how OpenRCT2 was done) of Worms Armageddon for the past 2 months with a lot of help from LLM tools; primarily Claude Code and Ghidra MCP. I've worked on it almost every day, reaching Claude Code Max 5x's 5 hour session limit multiple times every day. Suffice to say as a software rendered, sprite-based 90s PC game, Worms Armageddon is several orders of magnitude simpler than MGS2. Despite that, I think it will be 2-3 more months of work before I can compile a fully independent version of the game.
This is despite the game being an almost ideal candidate for automated RE, as it uses deterministic game logic with built-in checksum checks in replays and multiplayer. I've downloaded all the speedruns I could find for the game (as replay files) and I've retrofitted the replay system into a massively parallel test framework, which simulates over 600 games in about 30 seconds. So Claude can port all game logic independently without much need for manual testing; the replay tests can almost guarantee perfect correctness.
MGS2 doesn't have anything like that, so every ported function requires extensive manual testing. Even with LLM tools, an accurate decomp could take years (unless you're willing spend thousands of $currency per month on it).
This is really cool! Your process is compelling, and your choice of game is excellent. I'd like to read a long blog post about your entire journey from the beginning to a working binary once you get there.
For those wondering, there is a public Git repository at https://github.com/paavohuhtala/OpenWA.
As it happens I do have the habit of writing very long blog posts - though none on OpenWA so far. The OpenWA readme file serves as a bit of an introduction, though it's already a month old.
Keep your eyes open for Sonic R too. Sadly a lot of the online Sonic community has been toxic to the dev for being transparent about using Claude for the majority of the disassembly. Even though he's a very talented developer with lots of credit to his name, and only took a few weeks compared to a year+ if fully manual.
Having followed his bsky during his announcement, he started off per-emptively dissing on his haters that... didn't even exist yet. Constantly posting memes about how everyone was dissing him and how AI was totally superior (and then posting his angry sessions with Claude when it got something wrong) when most other users were just "that's cool man". The thing that made him quit bsky was a (now-deleted) thread someone posted criticizing the weird crash-outs. I think he was more... normal about the whole thing, people would have received the project quite a bit more positively.
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Decompilation to C (and even C++!) has been done automatically for 2-3 decades at least. I am not sure what has changed in recent years other than people playing fast and loose with copyright (and GitHub allowing it, likely because their LLMs also stand to benefit). Introducing LLMs here is only going to introduce errors, delays and likely push you away from a reliable result.
The challenge here is readability. Reading the TP source leak you link I think it's even behind the current state of the art, as it's barely above assembly. This is where I suspect even the smallest of LLMs may help, since you don't care that much if it introduces errors.
>Decompilation to C (and even C++!) has been done automatically for 2-3 decades at least.
Only in a very rudimentary sense and definitely not in a working compilation (much less binary equivalent) sense. LLMs have turned this from a gimmick for static analysis into something that actually works pretty well for recompilation projects.
> Only in a very rudimentary sense and definitely not in a working compilation (much less binary equivalent) sense.
Working is the easy part; the hard part is getting something that classifies as readable C. LLMs do not really help reach the "working compilation" part but benefit from it.
We are way past "working compilation" when it comes to LLMs. They are already really good at writing readable, compliable code. The big problem with LLMs is making sure the output binary actually does what you wanted it to do. But if you define the goal not merely as instructions in a vague, unspecific human language and rather as recreating a given set of binary instructions after compilation, this big drawback goes away. So in a sense they are better suited for recompilation projects than for developing new applications.
My point is that we have been past the "working compilation" way before LLMs, and I do not think anything in LLMs help with it, at best agents use these tools with the same efficiency. I disagree that they're good at writing compilable code, but agree on the readable part.
Which decompiler reliably produced working, high level C/C++ from assembly? I would have loved to use this thing you are describing here 15 years ago. Compilation is inherently lossy, so any system that could have given you this would have needed pretty heavy LLM-like features anyways.
>I disagree that they're good at writing compilable code
That was never part of the discussion, because as explained several times now it is irrelevant in this case. The existence of the original binary means all you need to do is match up things, which can be automated completely.
My take was more along the lines of: it wouldn't be convincing enough, if anything it would be too clean and perfect.
Does the TP decomp use AI to achieve their speed?
Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher level approximation that matches the flow/logic/structure - but the code will never be anywhere near close to the original source code. I could write the same C++ program in 3 different ways and get identical assembly, how do you go back to the exact source? The answer is that you don't.
Here's the same simple program, written in 3 different ways, producing identical binary compatible code: https://godbolt.org/z/qWrc8fEnn
How does the AI know whether it should produce back the snippet #1, #2 or #3? It does not. It cannot.
Who cares? Who said anything about recreating the exact code? You will get usable, compilable, and surprisingly readable source code, in your language of choice, that yields the functional equivalent of the binary.
Barring obvious edge cases that could show up but don't usually, like intentional race conditions. Timing is the one area where things get iffy.
That is quite incredible if that is true. Need to read a bit into that. Can you point towards relevant literature/examples? Also: please see my questions in the comment to your other reply
This blog post is a great starting point: https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-unexpected-effectiveness-of-o...
> Who said anything about recreating the exact code?
The person I'm replying to? Who said you will get the same code as if it were the original source?
if this leak is real... you probably could now. and as others have mentioned, similar code has been leaked before.
That's pre-2026 thinking. At this point, with the ability to lash IDA or similar tools to an agentic harness, there is no longer any such thing as a closed-source binary.
I’m interested in how LLMs handle obfuscated code. Throw LLM with IDA MCP at EasyAntiCheat_EOS.sys or the like (as the most common examples of heavily obfuscated software) and see how far they can get.
What is the state of the art of compilers here? What size of project are we speaking here?
What is the experience faulty decompilation, and the existence of bugs in the binary?
Could one decompile a binary to a more modern language than C?
It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.
>and ask them to decompile the game and structure and format as if it was the original source code. Asking them to ensure it compiles works fine
lot of people claiming this the end result is the AI downloading an emulator and rom
> It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.
There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc.
Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc.
De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it.
It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.
>Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.
Did you try the above links? I haven’t shared the full source but all game mechanics listed in the ja3 guide including code snippets where helpful.
There's so much irony in hyping up a machine that launders other people's work, and the way that's done is also giving it credit for other people's work that it had nothing to do with. You can't make this up.
It's (probably) a real leak. There are original comments in Japanese describing cut content and game logic that was scrapped in the final release.
Raw assets are probably the better tell
Whoa, since when is there a Jagged Alliance 3? Is it any good? JA2 is one of my favorite games of all time
It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game.
Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range.
The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view.
Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay.
It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.
How do you verify that everything is correct?
I’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.
check for console headers. those aren't that easy to get out of LLMs