What I find fascinating is the fact that you can implement those few lines in an esoteric language such as FRACTRAN or Game of Life and even boot Linux on them. Seems doable now. In theory.
Yes, I’ve tried it. For example, this was my winning entry from a year ago [0].
The LLM only performs trivial obfuscation, not advanced transformations.
For example:
if (x == 1 || x == 2) { ...
can be transformed into:
if (!(2+x*x-3*x)) { ...
An LLM will do this if you explicitly ask it to, but not on its own.
Yes, you haven’t tried it. LLMs are actually awesome at deobfuscation, but terrible at obfuscation. They just can’t do it yet.
They also lack the creativity needed for those entries. Obfuscation is only one part of it. Coming up with the idea is another. Many entries also have special qualities that make them true works of art.
Author here. The Ross’s Game Dungeon video was, to some degree, a motivation for me to start the reverse-engineering process, just for fun. The analysis took place over many years, and I figured out 95% of the format myself. AI helped me then with the coloring, which is pretty complex. I have read the Accursed Farms forum, of course. But it didn't help much.
The map mentioned there can be found as “Unknown Map” in the dropdown. However, I haven’t yet connected that map to the menu screen. It might be called “Tom’s Test Track,” because that string appears in the disassembly.
Integration into noclip might be easy, because I also have the geometry as a standalone .obj file.
On weekends, yes. During the week, that’s also true if they arrive within a short time frame, e.g., three minutes. Almost no one looks at “New”. That is the real issue.
Author here. Yes, it is integral. I chose this approach to first show how to draw it from back to front, because the code is easier to understand this way.
Nice to see an MCP integration here as well. In my experience, coding agents are great at analyzing MOS6502 code. Because the code is limited to only 64 kB, it does not overwhelm the agent. And in parallel it can write specs and even extract assets via normal coding tools.
Using my similar tool [0], I feel I get roughly a 100x speedup. I will definitely try regenerator2000.
Most such emulators have Internet access on the IP level. Therefore, this is a very cheap way to test anything on the Internet.
apk add nmap
nmap your.domain.com
However, the speed is heavily throttled. You can even use ssh and login to your own server.
It can also be used as a very cheap way to provide a complete build environment on a single website, for example to teach C/C++. Or to learn the shell. You don't have to install anything.
To reverse engineer old C64 games using Coding Agents, I built a CLI and MCP flow disassembly tool. The agent can search the disassembly, provide annotations, manage symbols, and reinterpret code and data.
AI is very effective for reverse engineering. Unless you’re doing it purely for fun, it makes sense to use AI where it helps.
I’ve tried to visualize the “navigate and modify” process you mentioned in [0]. It’s mesmerizing.
Because reverse engineering outcomes are comparatively easy to verify, it’s a good fit for training for AI. I expect major progress in the next few years, potentially to the point where reverse engineering many binaries becomes highly automated.
My Github site: https://github.com/s-macke
My personal site: www.simulationcorner.net