Case study

Psychonauts: matching Lua scripts and PC engine functions

Psychonauts decompiles the PC game's modified Lua 4.0 scripts and portions of its 32-bit x86 engine into source checked by per-function byte comparisons. Its tools extract scripts from a user-owned game copy, rebuild them with a patched Lua compiler, and compare engine objects with Psychonauts.exe. The author reports all script functions matching and the engine still early in progress.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 22
Last commit: 2026-10-26
Language: C
License (GitHub): MIT

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

Prerequisites: A personal copy of the current Steam version of Psychonauts.
Prerequisites: Linux or WSL, Python 3 and gcc; engine matching also needs pefile, capstone and Visual C++ 2008 without a service pack.
Limits: The author reports 106607 of 106607 script functions and 3375 of 10930 engine functions matching.
License: MIT license.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{psychonauts-decomp-case,
  title = {{Psychonauts: matching Lua scripts and PC engine functions}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/DrDecki/psychonauts-decomp}},
  url = {https://github.com/DrDecki/psychonauts-decomp},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/psychonauts-decomp-case/}}
}

Plain text

Psychonauts: matching Lua scripts and PC engine functions. https://github.com/DrDecki/psychonauts-decomp (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/psychonauts-decomp-case/

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · DrDecki/psychonauts-decomp · Revision 358267b