Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

I'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed:

- Moon Lights 2: https://github.com/Armonte/ml2decomp

- F-15 Strike Eagle II: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re

I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations).

The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.

I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns.

Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.

That page absolutely fills me with hope. I don't see some of my cherished childhood games in there. I should start a decompilation project for them...

Any idea if there's a place where we can request games for decompilation?

I see that one for Burnout Paradise is in the works, but I would love one for Burnout Revenge.

I love stories like this. I used Claude to decompile an old Windows program and port it to Linux, it was extremely challenging, I had a lot of success but ended up just rewriting it as a new app.

My personal opinion is that the very concept of IP misses the mark. “Property” requires scarcity. If I use something, it means someone else can’t use that thing. When I use a house for living, others are unable to do so. When I consume food or water, others people can’t do so.

Ideas aren’t scarce. Someone who reads a book, or looks at a picture, or makes use of a copy of software is not preventing other people from doing so. The idea that an idea can be restricted are given exclusive use to one particular party for any amount of time by law, is dystopic.

RMS is explicitly about FOSS and not just open source (in the sense of source available).

> You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.

Yes, you do. Decompiling and modifying a binary can be illegal itself under the DMCA in certain circumstances. But even if it is not, distributing the decompiled source is against copyright.

> Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source

AFAIK Java is specifically easy to decompile when it is not further obfuscated. That is not true for many other languages. And while you can technically reverse engineer any language it does make modifying software and even finding out what it does fundamentally more difficult.

> far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to.

It's certainly more liberating because there are more restrictions you have to liberate from in the first place. RMS argues that these restrictions should not exist in the first place. As for building being difficult, no free license requires the author to use a good and easy build procedure, but the GPL requires them to provide you all the tools required to build the software unless they are already readily available: "The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities."

Decompilation allows to fork, but scaling the fork and making it maintenable on a long time scale is a technical challenge.

The FSF succeeded at changing the mindset towards more collaboration.

I agree that this also allowed to divert efforts from research on reverse engineering tooling by reducing the needs.

But AI is game changer for reverse engineering, so no secrets will be hidden in binaries.

In a way, this is a merge of an alternate branch of history where RE would be more powerful.

I agree with you but I’d say the internet is just an enabler for this. It’s the humans who are cool and they even built an entire planetary network to share their cooliness.

Thankfully, once something is on the internet, it's here forever.

I've done a similar project before (taking an NES game I like, disassembling it, and doing a PC port). For me, the attraction is being able to make an ideal version of a game I like, with bugfixes, quality of life improvements, added polish, and not having to deal with hardware restrictions from old consoles. The amount of effort involved doesn't really make sense unless it's something you deeply care about, which is why most commercial rereleases of old games are emulated instead of this sort of improved native port.

Why not? Many folks feel an itch to play a certain nostalgic game that few others enjoyed. And they want to make it even better, especially as our expectations have grown over time.

I prefer 1080 as snowboarding games go. Though must admit some fondness for Cool Boarders and a selection of other lower quality games that few will admit to enjoying.

Decomp tools for N64 have had some breakthroughs even before AI. Now I imagine it's even better. If that facilitates folks geeking out with their favorite guilty pleasure then so be it!

I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).

Snowboard Kids is an awesome game, not a meme at all.

They do it because they love the game and want to preserve it, and because they can. You don’t need another reason.

Why do we store books in libraries, or write history textbooks? It's about preservation (and curiosity too).

It was easily one of the best racing games on the system?

im not going to post with as much confidence as your many other replies ... but this is like one of the rarest nintendo games ... maybe that has something to do with it

Before LLMs made these sorts of Sisyphean coding tasks tractable for normal people, there was IRC and Discord, where people with a special interest in programming and emulation could be egged on by the people who delight in the memes. I guess another POV is, were the special interest people and the meme lords ever really friends? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you aren't really thinking deeply enough about how and why these sorts of things actually get made. A sense of "community" no doubt.

It really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that randomly modifies C in the hopes of finding a better asm match) so I...just asked Claude to make one, custom-tailored to my needs. It almost feels pointless to publish it to GitHub when I can just tell the other contributors "hey fyi you can ask Claude to make you a better permuter"

It was a great game. I also play it on emulator now and then. I love the little fight to be the next on the ski lift after every lap.

I'm so excited about this. My cousins and I still play Snowboard Kids (one) whenever we meet up.

https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-dec... same author wrote about their process

Useful, but complements existing tooling & falls short on the hard part

I work on Ship of Harkinian. We're sering more vibed libultraship ports. Yet to see a real success

Massively, armed with the right tools you can tear apart old software now

Significantly. It also has sped up the ability to do recompilations, too.

I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.

I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:

Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.

We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.

By that logic VPNs and many other technical solutions are also not solving technical problems, since it is theoretically possible to achieve the same results by other means.

> Wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?

Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion.

Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path.

Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous.

Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.

With these old games sometimes the source is just lost. I used to work with a guy who wrote Brian the Lion(the Amiga game) and he always says he wishes he still had the source code for it. We've also looked briefly at the source code of Driver, and the only one in company archives was not the final version. There were 2 revisions after that one but no one has a copy of those. And then we pulled a bunch of old CDs with assets and code burnt back in 1990s and about 50% were unreadable already, god knows what exactly was on them.

Funny enough there's actually a project in progress to decompile Mario Golf:

https://github.com/monde-lointain/mariogolf64

Yeah, Double-Oh-Seven reigns supreme on the N64. And Bomberman, of course.

Did he stutter? SBK2 is #1 and it a'int close.

I mean if you look at the N64 catalog at the time when Goldeneye was released then yeah maybe. Looking at the N64 catalog as a whole I'd rank Perfect Dark above Goldeneye in the shooter category. The singleplayer that allowed split screen co-op, the many modes and bots in multiplayer. So much time was spent in that game.

What a strange way to spell Zelda Ocarina of Time!

Was recently discussing N64 games with friends in Japan. Nobody here knew Goldeneye.