Decomp Academy
Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C
Details
- External ID
- 48703412
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Decomp Academy
- Website domain
- decomp-academy.dev
- Launched
- June 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 197
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9562841530054644
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Over the past few months I've been heavily involved in the decompilation community. I've been hands-on decompiling a beloved game from my childhood (Star Fox Adventures). I started this journey with zero prior decomp experience—and to make things worse I had never really touched C nor assembly either.Learning how to decompile was challenging. It's difficult to find any good learning resources for it and any open-source projects for this are inactive and/or contain little actual learning material.So I put together Decomp Academy! Decomp Academy is an interactive way to learn how to decompile PowerPC assembly back into C. The site runs a live Metrowerks CodeWarrior GC/2.0 compiler, converts your C into assembly, and then checks how close your assembly matches the target. If even 1 instruction or bit is off, that's a fail. This is the gold standard for video game decompilation and this is much stricter than a normal decompile.As of writing there are 250+ lessons on the site and the lessons start at the very basics so anyone with a little programming experience should be able to jump straight in, even if you're not a C expert. Some lessons also have real functions taken from live open source decomp projects (Star Fox Adventures, Mario Party 4, Pikmin, Metroid Prime). The idea being you learn everything you need to know to be able to jump in and contribute to a real decompilation project when done.The site is completely free, open source and you have access to all lessons without having to sign up. All lessons are stored in markdown in the repo (src/curriculum), it's trivial to add or modify lessons. The site is very new and the lessons are rapidly changing every day with a whole C++ section on the way. The site has already been well received by the decomp community and I'm happy to share it with HN. I'm very keen on others to contribute to this project and I hope this becomes the best resource on the internet for learning the art of decompilation. Please let me know what you think!Source: https://github.com/JackPriceBurns/decomp-academy-fe
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- learn game decompilation
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Decompiling GameCube games into matching C requires deep knowledge of the PowerPC architecture, Dolphin/GameCube hardware, compiler quirks (Metrowerks CodeWarrior), and assembly reverse engineering.
What it would actually take: Building a platform or course for matching decompilation requires deep expertise with the PowerPC 750CL architecture, assembly-level calling conventions, and historical compilers like CodeWarrior. The tooling involves objdiff, Ghidra, custom symbol mappers, and automated compiler harness environments. Vibe coding cannot generate the assembly matching expertise or the specialized reverse engineering knowledge required.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: GTA San Andreas reverse engineering projects, ASI Loader
Concerns raised: Decompiled source code copyright/legal liability, Assembly knowledge barrier for beginners, Complex setup process (compilers, SDKs, environment configuration), Purple/blue color scheme perceived as generic AI-generated design
Feature requests: Lessons on setting up decomp projects from scratch, Coverage of additional CPU instruction sets (x86/64), Reference guide for less common assembly instructions, Tutorial on distributing binary patches instead of source
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 106 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 107 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 240 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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