gcc-papermario VS decomp.me

SM64 uses SGI's IRIS Development Option (IDO) compiler. And yes, it's unoptimised.

Paper Mario, however, /does/ use GCC, and it's optimised. Figuring out the compiler version was fairly easy as there's a limited number of options - we know when the game began development, so we looked for releases around that time. The harder parts were figuring out compiler flags (consider all the -f flags affecting code generation; papermario used -fforce-addr) and coming to the terrifying conclusion that the compiler was modified!

The majority of papermario was built with a modified build of GCC 2.8.1 [1] at -O2. The SDK code (libultra, nusystem) was built with GCC 2.7.2 at -O3. The iQue Player version, i.e. the Chinese release, was built with EGCS.

[1] https://github.com/pmret/gcc-papermario

https://github.com/decompme/decomp.me

I’ve posted this before but I love it so much I gotta do it again.

You plug in a piece of ASM from a video game ROM, and it gives you a first pass decompilation. On the left hand side you can edit this decompilation, and on the right there’s a side-by-side diff of the target ASM and what your source currently compiles to. It’s slightly gamified, looks great, is super easy to fork/share, and can be pretty addicting once you get into it. Super cool community.

Checkout http://decomp.me - it’s a community built tool used by a lot of video game decompilation projects. You put in the original bytecode, it will attempt a decomp, and then you fiddle with the source (using the same toolchain & flags known/best guessed to be used by original devs) until it matches perfectly. It’s super cool.