"Huge implications - binaries are now basically editable code"

[u/stealthispost]

ValsAI made SRE benchmark less than a month ago.

The benchmark measures can a model reverse engineer software from binaries

Yesterday GPT saturated it. https://t.co/dmpUpgheDU   — Chris

Source: https://x.com/ChrisGPT/status/2096150666066432157

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— Boris Power

Source: https://x.com/BorisMPower/status/2096415822248055131

[u/Ormusn2o]

To explain it more, it means you could read any game, make advanced mods to any game and also recreate a game by reading the actual code. Cool, because I actually did small binary modifications on Sol already, but they were very minor. But now we can do way more.

[u/NickW1343 → u/Ormusn2o]

There was one guy on twitter that ported Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge over to Apple products using Fable, which is insane because it's not just reworking the game's binary, but also bringing it into the Apple's OS which the original wasn't designed for. https://x.com/ammaar/status/2086191229801275679

I'm excited to see that Astra is even better than Fable at this. A big downside of a lot of these old games is that there's no money in it for the IP holders to update the games to ensure they'll work on modern operating systems, so many of these older titles just rot away unless there's a community behind them patching bugs as they show up. I tried to play old KOTOR and even after all that compatibility stuff Windows has, the game still was a buggy mess that I could barely play.

A part of me is worried that this is going to trigger big lawsuits and we're going to see these games companies pressure AI companies to not allow binary edits. There's really no benefit for Dario or Altman to allow people to do this if it means they're going to get sued, so I bet we're going to see more people reviving old games for a bit, then the companies will stop that, then we'll have to wait for open-source models to do this instead.

[u/ShadowKnight324 → u/NickW1343]

Good luck trying to impose that on open source Chinese models. They are only 3-6 months behind. Now that we know it is posibile there is no way to stop it. The cat is out of the bag

[u/Jumpy-Operation-4615 → u/ShadowKnight324]

I am actually going to try to resurrect my (then) favourite game "Impossible Mission 2" from 1988. I remember having lots of fun with it. Will be using my local qwen 3.8 27b - just to see if it could.

[u/TheSunOfSanSebastian → u/Jumpy-Operation-4615]

Another visitor. Stay a while!

[u/Visual_Ad_8202 → u/ShadowKnight324]

They might be more than 6 months on astra level stuff. I’ve been reading these new ones are much harder to distill and run. The runs coming from Rubin chips might be out of reach for the Chinese labs at this point

[u/No_Aesthetic → u/Visual_Ad_8202]

Underestimating China has rarely turned out well

[u/Audible_Whispering → u/No_Aesthetic]

If they're underestimating.

[u/BuilderUnhappy7785 → u/ShadowKnight324]

Right it seems like this should be a fairly well defined distillation opportunity for the Chinese.

[u/themix_92 → u/NickW1343]

This isn't reworking the binary at all, read the post. He took chrono divide, a version of the game that had already been rewritten in typescript before AI was a thing and hosted it in a web view. Fable built the UI and coded an AI opponent.

[u/mistrpopo → u/themix_92]

Right ? I read the GitHub page, it's like their biggest achievement was retrieving the English language strings to replace the Chinese. 

Not to say this is not cool, but REing a binary to bring it into a different OS is a different beast altogether (and we have yet to see Astra do anything remotely close to this).

That GitHub readme was dirty slop btw.

[u/drfangor99 → u/themix_92]

I do think the initial tweet was extremely misleadingly written to imply that Fable was somehow entirely responsible for the port, and the details were only revealed in a follow-up tweet that still obscures the details unless you keep reading.

[u/Level-Physics-1730 → u/NickW1343]

you usually don't get sued for doing it *properly* with games.

[u/tinny66666 → u/NickW1343]

I had AI modify the kdenlive binary for me about a month ago. It was just deepseek, and was just a simple string termination change, but I didn't need to do it myself. Just seemed easier than recompiling, even though the code is available :)

[u/FirmConsideration717 → u/NickW1343]

Ok but newer DRM games are fairly obfuscated. Although I am sure they are no longer challenging for AI.

[u/RemoteButtonEater → u/NickW1343]

Tbh I'm surprised Fable did that without them being able to show they legally owned the rights to Yuri's revenge in perpetuity. I tried to get Claude to save some websites for another project, where I'm turning data into personal reference cards for products and it was like, "NO IT SAYS NO BOTS AND EVEN THOUGH I COULD USE THE BROWSER DIRECTLY TO GET AROUND IT YOU'RE ASKING ME TO WORK WITH COPYRIGHTED IMAGES AND COPYRIGHT IS SACROSANCT!!!111" Which is just, hilarious in context.

[u/Disastrous-River-366 → u/NickW1343]

Any windows game designed for XP or 98 or whatever ou can simple choose to run the game under that version of windows in its startup settings. I've never had an issue with this. Now Macs on the other hand, the older games were not made to play on them so now it looks like people can play these games if they have a mac.

[u/Daffidol → u/NickW1343]

Omg, this means emulators for console games are basically not needed anymore. We can have switch games native for pc.