Show HN: Complete decompilation of Lego Island
foxtacles | 251 points | 6mon ago | github.com
indigo945|6mon ago
This project goes back to the LEGO Island Rebuilder [1] by (some of?) the same authors, which fixes several bugs in the original game release by patching it in memory (iirc). These fixes include some involved ones, like for the wonky framerate-dependent controls.
MattKC, who developed much of this original work, has a nice Youtube channel full of video postmortems for some of these [2]. It's kind of fun just to watch him poke around with a hex editor, unraveling the arcane mysteries of a long-sunken civilization of Win95 developers.
[1]: https://github.com/isledecomp/LEGOIslandRebuilder
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@MattKC
jeroenhd|6mon ago
I've learned of MattKC through a video of his about how he ported .NET to Windows 95 (mostly).
I love the dedication content like this shows off. In an age of ever decreasing attention spans, it's nice to see someone going through the grunt work for something other than pure financial gain.
ddtaylor|6mon ago
MattKC is a good YouTuber in my opinion. His videos are simple, fun and extremely information dense. I haven't had time but I purchased a Wii-U remote at a garage sale because it had all the pieces and was paired together. Days later I see MattKC on stream hacking the Bluetooth!
bri3d|6mon ago
The tooling and infrastructure in this project are pretty interesting as these things go. It's always cool to see how each decompilation project springs up with different ideas and goals - this one seems very focused on 1:1 accuracy, with a side-project for compatibility / cross-platform reimplementation:
* https://github.com/isledecomp/reccmp is a lint tool which compares compiled function reimplementations with the original binary and produces an automated report detailing the instruction level accuracy of the re-implementation, while dealing with all of the fun of C++.
* https://github.com/isledecomp/SIEdit is a resource editor for the bizarre RIFF-esque resource streaming format the original developer (Mindscape) seems to have invented.
Also while we're on the subject of vintage LEGO games, I've recently been quite into playing Manic Miners, a complete Unreal Engine remake (not decompilation/reimplementation, an actual ground-up recreation!) of Rock Raiders.
I'm hoping someone does Alpha Team next; it was a quite fun puzzle game but incredibly buggy.
Belphemur|6mon ago
For those looking for the game, it's on itch.io : https://baraklava.itch.io/manic-miners
mileycyrusXOXO|6mon ago
I’m gonna have to get Manic Miners, lots of fond memories playing Rock Raiders with my friends
mclau156|6mon ago
I am seeing more reason to re-make in Unreal, Unity, Godot, Blender lately, these softwares are becoming increasingly more beginner friendly and downloading 3D assets and programming 3D skeleton animations are becoming easier