Forged Alliance Forever

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T20:34:11+02:00

Yes, this happens in a big codebase especially a game that is optimized for speed. Example: you define a tree and to distinguish leaf nodes from interior nodes you use the lower bit of the pointer. Because nodes are aligned on a 4 byte boundary the lowest 2 bits of a pointer are zero so you can steal one. If you're not careful you now depend on the size of a pointer because of casting to / from int.

Statistics: Posted by Vee — 10 Oct 2014, 20:34

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T18:29:18+02:00

bigger virtual memory size is one thing you basically get for free just by recompiling.
unless you are sloppy and depend on sizeof(void*)==4 in any shape or form.

Statistics: Posted by rootbeer23 — 10 Oct 2014, 18:29

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T17:56:50+02:00

Doing that could possibly benefit from the extra registers (though it may introduce inefficiencies too), but it won't change the pointer size.

Yes, it would be much easier to rewrite the entire game than changing the pointer sizes in the decompiled code Maybe we can get a multithreaded & vectorized sim then too In fact even if you had the original C or C++ code it would still possibly not be very easy to change it for 64 bit, depends on how well the code was written.

Statistics: Posted by Vee — 10 Oct 2014, 17:56

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T17:41:58+02:00

I think it would be easyer to re-write the game. Any Volunteers?

Actually, even if you would be able to de-compile the Files (with legal problems ans stuff), you would get a messy code (as you wont recover the original code but get "something equal") you need to edit to fit 64Bit. And even than, course of all the mess, it perhaps is way slower than the original one.

Just grab some thousands of $ and ask GPG for Help.

Statistics: Posted by Koecher — 10 Oct 2014, 17:41

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T16:38:38+02:00

you cannot address more than 4GB if you have 32bit wide pointers.
-> good luck changing all data structures to have bigger pointers and different field offsets
no mere mortal algorithm can do that automatically.
a mortal human can do it since it only takes 5 years to do with a program the size of FA.

Statistics: Posted by rootbeer23 — 10 Oct 2014, 16:38

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T16:12:09+02:00

Shooting the breeze here with a crazy thought I just had. thygrrr, while reverse engineering it is impossible and illegal, is there any precedent for creating a sort of bubble or shell program? Run FA inside that shell somehow, with the shell's purpose being to provide additional memory space to FA's exe?

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 10 Oct 2014, 16:12

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T13:58:50+02:00

Zash wrote:
I play with family, united against Sorians.

Play with family, united, against humans.

I don't believe it's feasible (let alone allowed by the license) to reverse engineer and then recompile the entire game from 32 to 64 bits. This is very different from de- and then recompiling a few scripts; this about a change of CPU architecture in a binary that has 10 Megabytes of pure object code.

It'd already be incredibly difficult, bordering on impossible, to do with a file that's only 1% of the size of the Forged Alliance executables.

Statistics: Posted by thygrrr — 10 Oct 2014, 13:58

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T13:25:57+02:00

it is not possible with a reasonable amount of effort by a long shot.
maybe i am wrong. can you link to prior work where this has been done before?

Statistics: Posted by rootbeer23 — 10 Oct 2014, 13:25

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T12:55:18+02:00

As opposed to fake games?

"real games" is a subjective term. Everyone has their own likes

I play with family, united against Sorians.

Ignoring the problem won't fix it

Statistics: Posted by Zash — 10 Oct 2014, 12:55

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T09:21:13+02:00

Play real games.
Won't be an issue anymore.

Statistics: Posted by -_V_- — 10 Oct 2014, 09:21

Re: de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T09:08:46+02:00

I have no clue about coding and comsci but sounds fun (and might be aplicable?)
I dunno, just to bump this thread

Statistics: Posted by ALL_Sys_Nominal — 10 Oct 2014, 09:08

de-compile 32-bit FA and recompile to 64-bit?

2014-10-10T12:56:10+02:00

Anyone tried this?

Afaik, this would immediately lift the ram restriction from 3 GB to 192 GB, as well as make the memory leak bug a non-issue. Huge battles will finally be possible without crashing at 2.3GB barrier.

Am I in dreamland? someone must have tried something like this?

Thanks,
-- Zasha

Statistics: Posted by Zash — 10 Oct 2014, 02:36