Yep, you read that title right-I started another decomp project! This time, I’m attempting to decompile Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader: Make the Grade for PS2. This time around, I actually manage to find enough stuff floating around online to get past the “import file into Ghidra” stage! The main reason why I decided to try something like this again is because I played this game a lot as a kid, and still enjoy playing it from time to time now. That being said, a lot of the questions are getting repetitve, and I’d like to add some new ones in there if I can. Also, I love game mods that place the most random charcters into a new game, and the thought of creating the scene of a certain blue-haired virtual singer getting grilled by Jeff Foxworthy is hilarous to me. I looked online for any resources out there for any existing mods for the game (or even a way to mod ps2 games in general), and came up empty handed. So naturally, I thought, “Guess I’ll have to do it myself!”

This is going to be a HUGE long-term project for me. I am very unfamiliar with this whole process, I’m attempting to decompile a game that’s basically old and forgotten shovelware, and although I do know a few programming languages, I don’t know how to read C (the language Ghidra dissasembles stuff into), and I only know a tiny bit of assemly because I read about it a few years ago because I was extremely bored at work at the time. I am doing this purely for fun, so I don’t mind if this takes a couple of years, but I would also REALLY appreciate some help if anyone out there is interested! I will add a link here to the project once I create the repository on Github (probably later today if I don’t forget). If anyone out there would like to help out on my little passion project, don’t hesitate to let me know! My email should be…somewhere on this website, and if there is enough interest, I wouldn’t mind creating a discord server for the group as well!

Alright, that’s it for now. Back to staring at all of these hex numbers and stuff

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8/14 Update: I still plan on working on this in my free time when I can, but I’m pretty much at a point where I can’t progress unless I can figure out the secrets to using whatever tools are out there for this sort of thing (deatiled in https://github.com/Gmon20/makethedecomp/blob/main/whatishappening.txt). So you may see some pretty big gaps in between uploads/updates, but that does NOT mean the project is dead! Assume I’m just on a long mental health break unless noted otherwise (seriously, why doesn’t anyone put out a half-decent tutorial for these things WITHOUT skipping any crucial details?!?).