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.

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