Case study

Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver: a fork reporting a complete LLM-agent decompilation

Continues pret’s HeartGold/SoulSilver disassembly in a separate fork that reports the US Nintendo DS releases fully decompiled to C and C++ with LLM agents, while both ROMs still rebuild byte-for-byte against their retail SHA-1s. A checked-in progress report counts about 99% of mapped code bytes as C or C++, and a batch-by-batch work log records each replaced assembly range and the hash checks that followed. README says pret does not accept AI-generated code and does not want to be associated with the fork.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-19
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 813
Last commit: 2026-11-06
Language: C

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

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Evidence

Observed: Code and documentation observed; no download method or demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-09

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

The fork reports HeartGold and SoulSilver builds matching the US retail ROM SHA-1 hashes. Its HeartGold progress snapshot counts 97.9% of mapped code bytes as C, 1.4% as C++ and 0.6% as original assembly; INSTALL.md defines this as a source-language measure.
Builds require a legally obtained Metrowerks mwccarm 2.0/sp2p2 compiler and license file, plus tools/bin and linker templates from a Nitro SDK archive. Both proprietary inputs are supplied by the user. The repository includes DS filesystem assets under files/ and decompiled libraries under lib/.
Linux requires binutils-arm-none-eabi, Wine, Python 3, libpng, pkg-config and pugixml. Windows uses devkitARM under Cygwin or MSYS2; macOS requires 10.15 or later and Rosetta 2 on Apple silicon. The build checks ARM binaries, filesystem and ROM hashes; the fork’s GitHub build workflow is disabled.
The repository has no license file. Its README reports LLM-agent assistance and asks contributors to keep this fork’s code out of pret/pokeheartgold; pret prohibits LLM-generated contributions.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{pokeheartgold-llm-agent-decomp-case,
  title = {{Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver: a fork reporting a complete LLM-agent decompilation}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold}},
  url = {https://github.com/ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold},
  urldate = {2026-10-19},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/pokeheartgold-llm-agent-decomp-case/}}
}

Plain text

Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver: a fork reporting a complete LLM-agent decompilation. https://github.com/ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold (accessed 2026-10-19). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/pokeheartgold-llm-agent-decomp-case/

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About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources.

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
INSTALL.md GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
docs/DECOMP-NOTES.md GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
docs/progress/progress.json GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
heartgold.us/rom.sha1 GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
CONTRIBUTING.md GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
files GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
lib GitHub · ctrl-cheeb-del/pokeheartgold · Revision 2fc93ea
CONTRIBUTING.md GitHub · pret/pokeheartgold · Revision 5bb4b3b