Somebody ported Final Fantasy XIII into iOS using REA.

[eliriverback]

Or at least they think they did: So Square didn’t want to give XIII to PS5 so I made a port for myself on my iPad

This is getting out of hand. This repository is getting a lot of hype right now but these people have no idea what they are doing.

What I'm interested in is that would this really be possible? Not without an access to the source and maybe (preferably) to the original Engine. That's my opinion.

I'm not talking about Final Fantasy because discussing about reverse engineering a specific game would be considered as an infringement but as in general, can REA really be used to reverse engineer a full game project in a way that the agent could then recompile it into another operating system (as an example)?

I mean sure it can but how much faster the process would get through REA compared to building a toolset of your own.

The amount of false information considering the toolkit is increasing at alarming rate. It is hard wo publish any work done with it because people are now reverse engineering games without the permission of publisher or developer.

Is there an actual plan to publish any works about games that have been reverse engineered? I think abandonware could be one target but even that would be risky as someone somewhere might own the rights for the games. Even freeware games might not allow such work to be done without specific license. I think open source projects would be only viable public research target.

I cannot trust anything I find from online so I came to ask about it here. Some general rules should be stated for this repo or it would be getting really bad press quite soon. Not that anyone should really care. Even media doesn't understand anything about AI agents or reverse engineering.

However as a developer I'm worried that someone (and anyone apparently) can and will use this toolkit for reverse engineering which makes the decompiled source (or whatever is harvested from the source) part of the public AI knowledge. The hype will increase the phenomenon and anyone who has access to Claude could be harvesting binaries right now.

Unless the devs take the responsibility, toolkits like these will be scrutinized and reverse engineering will become regulated under state/country laws which makes AI agents soon uncooperative to reverse engineer anything. Meanwhile countries that do not regulate it will get ahead by decompiling the every binary they can get their hands onto.

Any thoughts? Interesting project and very useful if used ethically.

[FunToHard]

Reverse engineering and porting the game is entirely possible, but a costly method.

if you're worried someone might clone your application, make server-side web applications.

[eliriverback]

Yeah I have thought about that. But mechanically they are so simple that even the server side application wouldn’t offer too much of a protection. There is really no way to protect your work other than succumbing to the protection system itself through patenting and being ready to fight for what’s yours.

My main concern is that every other dumdum can now do this instead of just talented programmers who understand the concepts of the implementation. And every time a dumdum decompiles through an agent your work is fed straight into the machinery. Not that I take my work personally that valuable but it’s a concern towards others too and towards the general quality of products.

I don’t want to become the gatekeeper myslef but where is the golden line? Do you think they will start regulating the use of AI soon and what are the first steps?

[FunToHard]

There's no golden line.

They frontier AI providers already hard blocked AI from attempting penetration testing, with the pressure of other corporates it wouldn't take long for them to take down current models (Opus & GPT) which currently are willing to do reverse engineering, Gemini already refuses to do so. deepseek and kimi and other OSS models still exist and will keep existing.

And no pure vibe coder can reverse engineer applications properly, most big software go through profiling which isn't being done on this clone still creating a huge gap between usable software. We don't even need softwares atm, AI will do everything.

[eliriverback]

True. The need for reverse engineering is mainly a point of curiosity and nostalgia. If everything is running on AI only need for reverse engineering would be to learn old systems for the sake of old systems.

Once the models have enough data they can work out better solutions then anything currently existing. There is still the need for the engineer who can evaluate the work and point the model into right direction to get the desired effect that can be determined by human user only.

Only thing we would be missing is the efficiency and coherence of the traditional programs but for those who wish to work in legacy environments will be able to do so through AI.

We can already see the trend where every iOS fanboy will do the translation process again and again which is basically wasted quota for something that could be done once and then shared.

If the reverse engineering becomes so easy and cheap that anyone could do it with free unrestricted models there really is no reason to restrict it for the frontier models either. Only a law could stop them and only IP or a patent can protect you then.

However reverse engineering has been done for hundreds (if not thousands) of years and will be done as long as there are engineers. The biggest risk is that we humans ourselves forget how to innovate. Or even worse lose our curiosity in how things works and interest of understanding them.

I personally haven’t done binary decompiling ever so this is new topic and area of expertise for me. However people seem to give more credit for REA than it probably deserves because the true ingenuity still lies within the user. Even a vibe coder that is able to learn can eventually turn anything to something that works through reverse engineering. But turning that into viable product is still a job for engineers.

I don’t see that anyone looking to translate games onto different platforms truly needs the toolkit but it makes the job easier. Where it shines are the systems that haven’t yet been discovered, documented or understood well.

(Sorry for the long posts and thanks for the replies)

[eliriverback]

The guy in the Reddit thread is answering my questions and I'm starting to believe he's telling the truth. I mean it wouldn't be the craziest sh*t I have seen this week considering they revealed flying cars. Can anyone more oriented in reverse engineering confirm this plausible as a two day work?