Someone is attempting to decompile Lego Island

alehel@beehaw.org to Gaming@beehaw.org – 117 points –
So I started decompiling LEGO Island...
youtu.be

For anyone who played this as a kid, this video is really fascinating. Hope he keeps it up.

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MattKC has a lot of great content, he patched Lego Island a while ago to make it playable on modern systems

His video on the soundtrack had me fascinated!

Same. I'm impressed someone is able to figure that kind of thing out without any info other than a hex editor.

I haven't watched his videos but the tools are slightly better than just a hex editor. You can start by "disassembling" which decodes the hex into the set of CPU instructions. Then you can use graphical tools like IDA or Ghidra. You work through chunks of assembly and start grouping sets of instructions together into things like functions and label them. You end up with a load of (possibly labelled) boxes connected together by lines. It can be a painstaking and difficult process but the tools do help you tackle it piece by piece.