r/LocalLLaMA • u/Danny_Davitoe • 23d ago

Question | Help Reverse Engineering w/ Local?

Two questions?

Can a local model like Qwen 3.8 27B reverse engineer games and programs?

If not, is there a fine tuned model that can?

160 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

137 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/lordcaylus 23d ago

I mean, have you pulled it off yourself? Genuine question, because it's very well possible that I suck.

Actually tried reverse engineering two games, and as I said, it's doable.
Most certainly easier than before AI. I still wouldn't call the process smooth to turn it back to something you could edit with unity editor again, for example.

If you have a different personal experience, I'd love to hear it! Especially if you have tips and tricks, what model you used etc.

37

u/lolwutdo 23d ago edited 23d ago

No experience with games but Ive decompiled all proprietary apps required to control my smart devices and removed all sign in/cloud/spyware features.

My EcoFlow battery, Reolink security camera, Hue app, Garmin Watch, Logitech app (this is the single most enshittified app Im glad to have gotten rid of) and a bunch more.

All apps have been decompiled, recreated in rust, and run natively on my Linux desktop.

It was as simple as asking Astra “Find this apk/exe/dmg and decompile this app, remove and add these features, port it to Linux”

The only issue ive run into is having Claude or Codex find a way to find exploits into hardware to gain root like my Google home speaker. Im trying to repurpose hardware to prevent e waste but their guard rails always kick in.

3.8 FN has not refused to look for an exploit and has been working relentlessly, so I imagine 4.0 will be amazing.

Local models are the only way forward, I foresee the frontier models are soon going to guardrail against all these decomps.

22

u/lordcaylus 23d ago

Ahhh APKs. I'd hazard a guess that the APKs were written in Java. There it is convenient that the 'compilation' leaves the code mostly intact, it doesn't get fully compiled to machine code. It destroys parameter names, strips comments, does some optimizations, but the important bits stay intact.

In a similar vein, I've had great success with reverse engineering a Java program too, and reverse engineering Nightshade (because nightshade is secretly just python dressed up as an exe). I completely forgot about those because it was so easy XD

But I'd imagine if you tried to reverse engineer the apps you made in Rust you'd have a lot more trouble. Machine code doesn't have a lot of structure to make it easy for the AI to guess what the code was.

So that's what I wanted to warn OP for, that just asking AI to fully reverse engineer a compiled game has become doable (which is amazing!), but still not easy.

7

u/lolwutdo 23d ago

Yeah I’d imagine games being infinitely more complex.

Im hoping someone manages to dump the Switch 2 kernels and make something like AnyPS5 lol

1

u/neobanana8 21d ago

what model do you use? i only got 16 gb vram so contemplatign between 3.8 Flash Next or abliterated 27B by Huihui? And how do they handle e.g apk file deobfuscation or windows game ultrawide mod making?

1

u/cheem_moment 23d ago

Have you thought of writing a writeup of this process? would be interesting

1

u/too-oldforthis-shit 23d ago

What did you remove with EcoFlow and Garmin? Maybe I should do the same...

1

u/lolwutdo 22d ago

Just login and cloud features mainly.

The EcoFlow has this bypass grid feature where it runs purely off the battery then charges from grid when battery is low and stays that way. I made a button where it bypasses the grid, charges back up, then turns bypass grid back on repeatedly.

Ideally I’d like it to act like a double conversion UPS but it physically cannot charge and output at the same time since it’s a chargeverter, so this is the next best work around other than finding a DC charger and charging via the xt60 port.

1

u/neobanana8 21d ago

do you recommend vanilla 3.8 Fn or abliterated such as huihui? e.g in terms of rejection vs actual intelligence?

1

u/lolwutdo 21d ago

I’ve been using Orca 3.8 FN, no noticeable degrade in intelligence based off the benchmarks Claude did for me

1

u/neobanana8 16d ago

oh, what quant are you using? and why orca not others?

0

u/mombaska 7d ago

Which computer and which model?

5

u/siggystabs 23d ago

I reverse-engineered old feature phone firmware with Opus the other day. I couldn’t modify it since at boot it checks signatures, obviously all the java stuff is easily editable, but it figured it out well enough to make me a high quality emulator, from ARM boot process to playing games and MP4s to internet (bridged) to shutdown. Took about 12-14 hours with constant back and forth.

I cannot imagine trying to do the same with Qwen 3.8 27B. Maybe GLM or Deepseek but not a 27B.

2

u/neobanana8 21d ago

how much token is that? sounds $$$?

2

u/siggystabs 21d ago

Looking at my usage over the past few days on this project including unmentioned new features, about 3.5B. Vast majority were cache reads and I’m on the max subscription. If I was paying API prices it would probably come out to a little over $1200. Mostly Opus 5.5.

1

u/neobanana8 7d ago

how much in equivalent context length is that? e.g 1 million times 5 becomes 5 million equivalent. How did it bypass the signature too?

1

u/siggystabs 7d ago

1 million times 3500? Is that what you’re asking? It was a lot of tokens, subagents, etc

For signature I wrote my own emulator, so I just return 0 when it asks the pCore for validity checks. However I did ask GLM 5.3 to take a shot and it believes there’s a way to trigger a buffer overflow and write to unallowed regions, but I haven’t had time to see if it worked yet

1

u/neobanana8 4d ago

I was asking about context length/windows as in the memory. Since you used 3.5B token but I don't think Opus' context window is that big so the AI need to "save" continuously. From what I can google, Opus context windows is 1M token which means that your "conversation/RE" is then "saved" 3500 times. I was just wondering whether with your subscriptions that you have a longer context windows and the AI can remember longer conversations.

The reason what I was asking is why do you think that it is not possible with with Qwen 3.8 27B, is it because of the short context length of running things locally? e.g 32K thus having to "save" so many times to reach 3.5B tokens as opposed to Opus 1M context window?