ia32rtools

There's similar set of tools by notaz[1] that were used to static recompile starcraft, diablo, diablo 2, and jazz jackrabbit games to ARM Linux. You can read more about the recompilation here[2]. 1: https://github.com/notaz/ia32rtools 2: https://www.giantpockets.com/starcraft-pandora-port-came/

There are at least a couple of other examples of similar projects: NES -> native executables: http://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html x86/Windows starcraft -> arm/Linux for openpandora: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/starcraft.73844/ (Tools used for this: https://github.com/notaz/ia32rtools) For a lot of consoles, particularly older ones, this tends to yield worse performance than a JIT. Between different memory layouts, weird threaded code, jump tables, (and especially) self modifying code, a JIT can do a much better job building efficient code since it has all of the runtime information. For newer consoles which more closely resemble PC hardware, things are definitely better; the current generation will basically look like the Starcraft port; an API compatibility layer.

Very impressive! I just left a bug report with instructions to get it working with VC2013 Express. How does your technique in epanos compare to https://github.com/notaz/ia32rtools used to decompile Starcraft so it could be ported to ARM? If you do get around to it, I'd love to see a Linux version. Even a 32-bit only version would be sweet. I've had great success with the ia32-libs getting 32-bit apps to run on 64-bit OS's.

The bulk of the logic seems to be here: https://github.com/notaz/ia32rtools/blob/master/tools/transl... It looks like it's not a full decompiler, but just an instruction-level one - it doesn't attempt to recover any more high-level structure beyond if/goto and function boundaries with parameters. Look at lines 4500-4533 for an example. He also appears to be parsing disassembler output(!) for its input.

The tools that he used to convert x86 to C can be found here: https://github.com/notaz/ia32rtools Video of the game running on an OpenPandora here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vWnyDrNQO4.