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Why native PC conversions of console games are suddenly everywhere — Reverse Engineer Anything gives AI agents a unified toolkit, and byte-for-byte checks keep hallucinations in line

The stage was set, all that was needed was a push... from an army of bots.

Over the past weeks and months, it's increasingly commonplace to encounter native PC ports of previously console-exclusive video games, developed with the help of frontier AI models and a new tool named Reverse Engineer Anything (REA). With dozens of titles ported to PC over the past few months, the big questions are: why is this now possible, and what changed?

The better-known conversions like Super Mario Galaxy and Modern Warfare 2 use AI agents, but their handlers mostly still had to interpret results and direct each step of the process. That's now much easier with Reverse Engineer Anything. Although it shows up in many conversations, REA doesn't do the heavy lifting by itself. It's actually a mix between a toolkit and agent harness, wiring together previously disparate tools under one ceiling.

REA analyzes and manages collected information tools: binary analyzers, decompilers, metadata tools, firmware images, database readers, and so on end up linked via agents. Those tools are made available to your AI agent of choice, along with skill files with additional instructions.

Simplistic as it may sound, it's the glue that once again significantly cuts down the time spent on "chores" that a developer would otherwise have to do while reverse-engineering code, which started with emulating consoles themselves.

Emulation of video game consoles on PC is nothing new, having emerged in the 90s in the 2D era, and gradually transitioning to 3D consoles such as the PlayStation 1, and Nintendo 64. Throughout the early 2020s, emulators and toolkits evolved at a rapid pace, covering more systems than ever — even the PlayStation 3 and its notorious Cell processor. Physical hardware is taken apart and inspected more easily and at deeper levels than ever, as tools like the Raspberry Pi become cheaper and more powerful. These elements set the stage for the ultimate task: to fully decompile and recompile a game and convert it to run on native PC instructions, rather than relying on software emulation. Only one barrier remained: dedicated development time.

To reverse-engineer a game, you need dozens of different tools, analyze the game's executable, run it, inspect which files it reads, which calls it makes to the operating system, what memory it allocates, and so on and so forth. This is exceedingly tedious, and yet can't be done half-heartedly: one errant byte is a bug. It's like undoing a machine with a million cogs and keeping track exactly where each one was, its size, and orientation. Modern games grew, too, and can have millions of lines of code.

But that kind of nitpicky, repetitive work is just what computers excel at — even non-deterministic ones like LLMs. 2026's AI models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 families are "smarter" in the sense that they follow complicated instructions more closely and can better keep track of their tasks, granting them a higher degree of autonomy. The high token efficiency of lower-grade variants like Claude Sonnet also makes them somewhat affordable, if not cheap, to use on a humongous project like taking apart an entire game.

Given how AI bots can hallucinate and make up strange replies and code, you may wonder how a project of this scale ever gets accomplished. It's simple: your agent hands you decompiled source code, and it compiles it again to see if it matches the original byte-for-byte. Even if they hallucinate, the bots can try over and over until they get it right, and developers can correct them if needed.

Reverse-engineering needs multiple tools, all with their own technical terms and idiosyncrasies. Whereas before developers had to wrangle them across terminal windows, now you can get your agent to twiddle bits and talk between programs on your behalf, so long as you issue the right orders. They don't have to stop for breaks, either.

With relatively simple prompts, you can poke around and break down a game or application — provided you have one of the pricier agent subscriptions, or can absorb high token bills, as for example the Modern Warfare 2 decomp took three months and up to 700 billion tokens to accomplish. Had its developer used REA, he may have cut down on time and tokens both.

Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.