Former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij told Rock Paper Shotgun that AI-assisted reverse-engineering tools could let third parties convert the PlayStation 5 version of Grand Theft Auto VI into a playable PC version without Rockstar's involvement. He estimated such an effort could cost 'tens of thousands of dollars in tokens' and produce a result inferior to an official port, but potentially good enough to satisfy some players. Reports suggest Rockstar is currently targeting a first-quarter 2027 PC release for the game.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-11-06
Anthropic developer advocate Addy Osmani confirmed the company added two sentences to Claude Code's Opus 5.5 prompt instructing it to avoid recreating a specific existing game, even if renamed, citing its usage policy against IP infringement. He said original games, genre games, and projects built from a user's own designs and assets should still work, and that Anthropic will keep adjusting the rules. The change follows developer complaints on GitHub that Claude Code was refusing game-building and reverse-engineering tasks.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-11-02
Users say Anthropic's Claude Code and Opus 5.5 are refusing tasks tied to reverse-engineering, including use of the Reverse Engineer Anything tool, apparently due to a new internal rule against recreating existing games. A purported rule text circulated by a Twitter user states the model should build original games but not recreate a specific existing game even if renamed. Developers have also reported refusals mid-project, when replicating mechanics, or patching tabletop-style games, alongside separate reports of refusals on unrelated reverse-engineering tasks like analyzing crash dumps or removing TV junkware.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-31
Hobbyists are using AI coding tools to rapidly reverse-engineer classic games like Halo, Wind Waker and Super Smash Bros., porting them to new platforms such as web browsers, phones and mixed-reality headsets. These 'decomp' and 'recomp' projects, which traditionally took years of manual work, are now appearing at a much faster pace, with one creator, Sotraidis, saying AI let him produce far more projects far more quickly than he could have alone.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-23
The developer behind the ReC98 project, which reverse-engineers the source code of early PC-98 era Touhou and Seihou games like Shuusou Gyoku, announced they are stepping away from the work. The final technical post details a quirky bug involving negative-value point items being misrendered as unsigned integers, discovered during a 2024 code cleanup effort.
rec98.nmlgc.net
· 2026-10-22
A blogger reverse engineered the Android app for the music guessing board game Hitster, decompiling its APK with jadx to inspect its code. They found a JSON file containing an encrypted card-to-song database and located the AES decryption routine directly in the app's source, allowing them to decode the mapping between card IDs and Spotify tracks without needing a paid Spotify or Apple Music subscription.
wuemeli.com
· 2026-10-21
The admin of decomp.dev, known as Encounter, announced the site is closing because advanced AI models have made reverse-engineering game code dramatically faster than the traditional human-led process. Encounter said it has become impossible to distinguish projects driven primarily by humans from those produced largely by AI, undermining the site's collaborative structure.
games.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-16
Developer peiikai released a free fan-made PC port of the 2019 Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, built almost entirely using Claude to decompile and reverse-engineer the original code. The beta runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with an experimental Arm Linux build, and requires users to supply their own game files. It adds features like adjustable aspect ratios and resolutions, keyboard and alternate controller support, 360-degree movement, and a randomizer with seed-based saves and item shuffling.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-16
A developer trying to digitize family photo negatives found their Plustek 8200i scanner's new chipset lacked Linux support. Inspired by a method shared by Tom Crider for fixing a mouse driver, they used Claude AI alongside a Windows VM to capture USB data during scans, producing a working SANE driver within hours and a near-complete one, including infrared support, within days. They also built a companion scanning app called Negative Vibes, though they later found someone had independently submitted official SANE support for the same scanner.
blogs.gnome.org
· 2026-10-15
AI systems are now able to reverse-engineer compiled video games and software back into source code far faster than manual efforts, which previously took years and required large community projects like OpenGOAL and Ship of Harkinian. The resulting decompiled code can be modified, enhanced with features such as higher frame rates and dynamic resolution, and recompiled to run natively on other platforms.
popcar.bearblog.dev
· 2026-10-14
A new toolkit called REA connects coding agents to analysis tools for native binaries, JavaScript/Electron apps, .NET assemblies and websites, letting developers ask an agent to investigate how a feature works and rebuild it. Setup is done via 'npx rea-agents setup' and supports agents including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and Grok Build, with analysis running locally and optional integration with Hopper, Ghidra or IDA for native code.
github.com
· 2026-10-12
A new tool called REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) was shown inspecting a running browser game via a local debugging connection, extracting its index.js source and settings. It found the game starts at speed 6, accelerates by 0.001 per update, and caps at a max speed of 13, then rebuilt that rule in a small teaching version with an adjustable speed slider.
rea.tools
· 2026-10-10
GoKawiil