Amazing post, I loved this game as a kid.

Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.

And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.

Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D

This is how an AI-assisted article should be: they used AI to decompile, find things out (with some very interesting techniques listed at the top of the article) but the article itself is human-written. It shows they used AI to help themselves understand, not used AI to do everything.

This was a good example where a talented engineer worked hand in hand with AI to get the decomp to work.

I think some people are brute forcing it through a lot of agent time and expense, but they used 6.1 Sol Medium, a great but not a top capability AI model+effort.

This matches what I've been hearing regarding talent and experience making a big difference in task speed and cost when using AI. When prices stop being subsidized, this will be a key factor when evaluating engineer performance: "you've used a lot of tokens and don't have much to show for!"

Who knows where this is going to end, but Talent+AI still beats Vibe work by a lot.

> I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't left my psyche ever since.

This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.

Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.

It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.

Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.

Rather than loading the raw approximate decompile code into SQLite, you'll likely get better results using Ghidra directly with tool calls through an MCP adapter. This is especially important when the analysis tracing fails, like with some complex indirect jump patterns with vtables. Xrefs and pattern searches are of course natively supported, and you can load in memory snapshots.

A simple "/goal analyze this codebase, assign names for each function, and creates named structs for parameters." works well, even with quite weak agents. Remember, parsing through heaps of text is their forte!

This setup also works for more exotic non-x86 architectures with more dynamic code loading, like PS2, N64, etc.

Classic Transport Tycoon allowed you to set a locomotive waiting on a street crossing to run over and destroy trucks and vehicles of the competition. I wonder if there is an equivalent in this game

I'd really love a followup post where you find the highest scoring pizza possible -- feels like you must min-max now, yes?

Back then (about 30 years ago), there was a whole series of “Tycoon” games. Fast Food Tycoon was one of the better ones. And my favorite to this day is Sid Meyer's Railroad Tycoon.

Same for me with "Patrician 3". I loved to play this game back then. It was the first thing I wanted to copy when I taught myself programming. I'm still thinking about it from time to time.

I loved this era of games. Caesar 3 was a favorite. And of course RCT1.

This is great write-up and it's great that we can use AI tools to peek behind the curtain of how games like these were made.

Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.

This kind of projects (OpenRCT2, OpenLoco, Open...) are absolutely awesome!

But all of them need one step, free assets under Creative Commons or similar licenses).

I remember the big change of OpenTTD when it became finally all free software.

I wish to know Blender3D to help this projects, but I am a regular IT guy.

This is so fascinating. These kind of isometric games were really defining in my childhood so it's amazing to be able to peek behind the curtain in terms of how it all works to render. So interesting about the lighting and how they had pre-rendered .spr files for windows alongside the regular lighting. So cool!

I played this game a lot as a kid (also Biz Tycoon). Very odd game, but I still love the pre-rendered 3D look of games likes these so much.

These are literally the first and last sentences of the post and may change the perspective for European readers:

>Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator

nope, never hear of

>I actually call this game Pizza Connection 2 because that's the European name!

ah yes, I played that at a friends house!

Incredible write up. The visuals are amazing

- everyone does this with all the frontier models only all the time

- wanna see a post of people experimenting with all the models and do a write up on it.

- if nobody writes such a post, i will. i am in the process of decompiling multiple games

This stereotype got me laughing

> Goths stay home until 09:00.

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