A developer used AI to reverse-engineer two closed game binaries

Vittorio Romeo used Fable 5.1 and Astra to reverse-engineer two closed-source game binaries and turned the results into working mods. He posted the repos and a showcase video rather than screenshots, which is what makes the claim checkable.

The first mod adds aim-down-sights and weapon-versus-environment collision to Prey (2017), a game that never shipped ironsights. The second decouples Touhou 11 and 12 from a hardcoded 60 FPS game-logic assumption, so the games run at high refresh rates without the gameplay speeding up. Neither game exposed source code or mod tools for this kind of change. Whatever let Romeo find and alter that logic came entirely from having a model read the compiled binary.

That matters for anyone who has ever wanted to fix a specific, small thing in a game with no modding scene. Until now, that wanted a rare skill set and weeks of spare time to spend on it. Romeo says the binary analysis itself, the part that used to take weeks, is what collapsed.

Commenters in the thread pushed back that skilled human reverse engineers could already do this work. That's true, and it's also beside the point. Competent humans could always find the ironsight logic in Prey's binary. They rarely did, because the payoff for one player's pet feature didn't justify weeks of disassembly. Take the weeks away and the calculation changes even though nothing about what's technically possible does.

The post doesn't say how long the process took end to end, or how much manual checking Romeo did before trusting the model's output enough to ship it. Reverse-engineered game logic that's subtly wrong doesn't crash. It just introduces bugs that look like the original game's quirks. Verification has no shortcut yet.