AI Agent Swarm Reverse-Engineers 2001 GBA Game Snood Byte-for-Byte in Two Weeks
Aizkmusic · x · 2026-09-24
A developer fully reverse-engineered and decompiled the 2001 GBA game Snood using AI, with the rebuilt code matching the original ROM byte-for-byte (SHA-256 identical). He ran 20+ parallel DeepSeek V4.1 agents, each assigned one function in its own sandbox, with larger models verifying and merging results. Agents first identified the compiler as agbcc (GCC 2.95 from Nintendo's GBA SDK), verified by recompiling standard library functions. Matching was stuck at 3% for a week until he switched to agent swarms, jumping from 7% to 81% in 5 hours; the final 300 bytes took days of compiler forensics. Cost: 4-5 billion tokens over two weeks of on-and-off work — what would've taken a hobbyist team years. He also learned the game generated music via the GBA's four sound channels MIDI-style, with only 11kHz 8-bit sound effect samples. He argues such easily-verifiable tasks are ideal for agentic workflows and expects AI to preserve lots of forgotten code.
More from coding & agent
- Skip ComfyUI: generating images straight from the terminal is underrated — JayoTree · 2026-09-24
- AI is eager to add code but never to delete it, dev laments — DanielLockyer · 2026-09-24
- Run a Claude Code-like coding workflow for free locally with Ollama — Aiden_Tech_Ai · 2026-09-24
- AGNTCon + MCPCon EU session recordings released with talks from Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS and more — lee_stott · 2026-09-24
- Pamela Fox shares a framework for parallelizing development with GitHub Copilot agents — lee_stott · 2026-09-24
- Developer gives Claude Sonnet 4 functional memory — it still recalls lore months later — repligate · 2026-09-24