Vibe reverse engineering of old games and new hardware
Speaker
Piotr Migdał
Piotr Migdał /pjɔtr ˈmig.daw/ - a curious being, doctor of sorcery.
Professionally: I am a founding engineer at Quesma, investigating ever-changing limits of agentic AI in software engineering.
Previously: Co-founder & CTO of Quantum Flytrap, deep learning consultant, data viz specialist, quantum physics PhD.
Personally: I dance balfolk, fusion, and Zouk. I do sauna rituals, among trees, ponds and streams. A bit more on my journey in this post.
Abstract
Reverse engineering binaries once required deep expertise. Today, AI models like Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Gemini 3.1 Pro change the rules. Watch how pairing AI with the NSA's Ghidra decompiler or simple hex tools like xxd makes binary hacking accessible. We will dive into practical projects: hacking infinite lives into Atari’s River Ride, porting the legacy game Chromatron, decoding LED backpack protocols, and hunting for backdoors. Let me show how to add reverse engineering to your everyday skills.
Description
Have you ever wanted to dissect a binary file, port a legacy game, or decode a mysterious hardware protocol, but felt you lacked the deep, low-level expertise? You aren't alone.
Until recently, reverse engineering was an intimidating, highly specialized skill. But with cutting-edge models like Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, the barrier to entry is gone. In this talk, I will show you how to leverage AI agents to read, understand, and manipulate binary code effectively.
We will dive into real-world projects that prove this:
BinaryAudit: A look at the open-source AI benchmark I co-authored (https://quesma.com/benchmarks/binaryaudit/). We test if modern models can detect malicious backdoors from binaries alone using Ghidra, the NSA's open-source decompiler.
Atari ROM Hacking: How we achieved infinite lives in the classic game River Ride by having AI directly modify the binary code, see a port by a colleague, https://quesma.com/blog/ghidra-mcp-unlimited-lives/.
Legacy Porting: The journey of taking Chromatron, an old binary game built for WinX and PowerPC, translating it into Rust, and successfully recompiling it for Apple Silicon and WASM.
Hardware Tinkering: You don't always need heavy decompilers. I’ll show how we used AI, raw intuition, and basic command-line tools like xxd to create a custom Bluetooth interface for an LED backpack and decode a proprietary thermal camera image format hidden inside JPGs.
Just a few months ago, this level of assisted reverse engineering was clunky. Today, it’s a reality. I will share my workflow (featuring tools like Ghidra, Claude Code, Cursor, and uv) to provide a concrete starting point. Let me show you how to tackle mysterious binaries and add reverse engineering to your everyday toolkit.