Grokathon Winners Reverse-Engineer GameBoy ROMs and BMW Firmware into Clean C with Grok

NicoVerderosa · x · 2026-08-10

A team won 1st place at xAI's Grokathon by building a harness that allows Grok to reverse-engineer old binary executables.

The system leverages MCP interfaces to integrate various tools: static disassembly via Ghidra, memory inspection and perturbation via a process emulator, and computer use through visual feedback. Using this setup, they successfully rewrote old GameBoy ROMs up to 262KB into clean C code. They also demonstrated the paradigm on automobile firmware, successfully reconstructing the runtime of a 1995 BMW control unit.

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