Case study

Black & White: reconstructing the game from its x86 binary

Black & White reconstructs the 2001 game's systems in portable C++ using analysis of its original x86 executable. An IDA and Ghidra pipeline walks RTTI vtables to recover class methods; the native viewer runs reconstructed world loading, physics, animation, scripting and audio paths.

Targets: Binary · Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06

Stars: 21
Last commit: 2026-10-10
Language: C++

GitHub data as of 2026-11-09

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Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: A personal copy of the Black & White v1.0 binary is needed for the decompilation pipeline.
Prerequisites: IDA Professional 9.1 idalib is the primary decompiler; Ghidra is used for comparison.
Limits: The native reconstruction remains partial.
License: MIT.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{black-and-white-reconstruction-case,
  title = {{Black \& White: reconstructing the game from its x86 binary}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/sp00nznet/bw}},
  url = {https://github.com/sp00nznet/bw},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/black-and-white-reconstruction-case/}}
}

Plain text

Black & White: reconstructing the game from its x86 binary. https://github.com/sp00nznet/bw (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/black-and-white-reconstruction-case/

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · sp00nznet/bw · Revision eb48ae2
tools/decomp/README.md GitHub · sp00nznet/bw · Revision eb48ae2