Show HN: Complete decompilation of Lego Island

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.<p>MattKC, who developed much of this original work, has a nice Youtube channel full of video postmortems for some of these [2]. It&#x27;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.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isledecomp&#x2F;LEGOIslandRebuilder">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isledecomp&#x2F;LEGOIslandRebuilder</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@MattKC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@MattKC</a>

The tooling and infrastructure in this project are pretty interesting as these things go. It&#x27;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 &#x2F; cross-platform reimplementation:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isledecomp&#x2F;reccmp">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isledecomp&#x2F;reccmp</a> 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++.<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isledecomp&#x2F;SIEdit">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isledecomp&#x2F;SIEdit</a> is a resource editor for the bizarre RIFF-esque resource streaming format the original developer (Mindscape) seems to have invented.<p>Also while we&#x27;re on the subject of vintage LEGO games, I&#x27;ve recently been quite into playing Manic Miners, a complete Unreal Engine remake (not decompilation&#x2F;reimplementation, an actual ground-up recreation!) of Rock Raiders.<p>I&#x27;m hoping someone does Alpha Team next; it was a quite fun puzzle game but incredibly buggy.

I did a few thousand lines of this.<p>In particular it was interesting learning about D3D retained mode as I did that part. What a weird piece of rendering history.<p>Worth a search if you haven&#x27;t heard about it before: D3DRM.

You can build a mountain, if you do it brick by brick...

Thank you to everyone who worked on this. One of my favorite games growing up, I’m glad to know it’ll be around to show my kid.

I love these kind of things, for years I want to learn decompile old games....but equal other things I do not know what it is the first steps or tools.

I had aspirations to decompile another MSVC 4.2 game (FireFight) and I got stymied on CMake - among other things.<p>This repo looks like a good reference.

I liked this game when I was a kid but I remember being massively disappointed that there wasn&#x27;t more building.

The game looks like Roblox and is just as creepy too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;xyqXZDyR-RA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;xyqXZDyR-RA</a>