Hacking Misc AI+MCP Server for Romhacking and Reverse Engineering

[acr514]

Hey everyone,

I was wondering how everyone felt about AI in romhacking and reverse engineering. I'm not gonna lie, if it wasn't for AI, I wouldn't be able to go as fast as I am right now on my various projects. But I also can't help feeling like I'm cheating a bit (imposter syndrome and all that). At the same time, I also feel like AI is making romhacking and reverse engineering much more approachable to a lot more people and that thanks to the work of people before us, we can go that much faster.

In my opinion, AI is good for these tasks however, you still need the knowledge and skills to understand what the AI is doing and telling otherwise it's still gibberish and you will most likely break something.

Please note that I'm not talking about translation here but really deciphering assembly code, hex and identifying routines and encoding that can eventually lead to translation (and machine translation is a whole other topic).

Also, I was wondering if people would be interested in a somewhat "universal" like an MCP server where you bring your own API key and can use it to reverse engineer games from PS1 onwards and until the Xbox-ish (when Shift-JIS was somewhat standard), using the Capstone Engine library.

 

[Urbanshadow]

I use claude for my GB romhack projects. Fiddling around the agent I've done a couple of things that really boosted claude capabilities.

The first one was to find all pandocs and hardware documentation I trust and condense them into a claude skill, so it integrates with the agent without requiring web searches. That alone greatly improves the agent ability to understand the platform

The second one was to create an emulator for AI. it's an emulator/debugger and exposes control surfaces (inputs, run for frames, pause, halt, reset, savestates), hardware access (cpu registers, ram instruction, ram data, sram dump/load), debug control (breakpoint, watcher, conditional expressions), and finally display (render frame to disk, for human control) all through MCP, so it's the agent the one playing and debugging the game and can obtain values and debug functions while playing.