[HN Gopher] Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
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Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
Author : healeycodes
Score : 166 points
Date : 2026-10-24 18:17 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (healeycodes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (healeycodes.com)
| yayachiken wrote:
| 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
| fredrikholm wrote:
| > 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I think this is similar now in most things. Music or blog posts
| etc. Yet when you try to discover something, for some reason
| it's really hard to find good quality material.
|
| A few years ago there was mathematics progress in
| recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I
| foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell
| us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind
| since.
| cellsstudio wrote:
| 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!
| rightbyte wrote:
| The move to 3d sim games was such a mistake for the industry.
| Pixelart was way better at the time. It took like 15 year to
| make it look good again and that with cartoony cell shading
| anyway.
| vintagedave wrote:
| 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.
| hlynurd wrote:
| How do you know it's human-written?
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Not OP, but I have to agree with them. The text just makes
| too much sense. There's no irrelevant shit tossed in for no
| reason, and I'm not really seeing any annoying LLM-isms.
|
| Of course, I might be wrong.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| i think its heavily edited, but there is a definite LLM
| influence
|
| > the named animation sequence
|
| noone abused verbs like this in the before times. a named
| animation sequence?? as opposed to what, ephemeral
| anonymous animation sequences?
| treyd wrote:
| I've totally written a phrase like this before.
|
| And in this context, _literally yes_ that 's what it
| sounds like. The .ani file can contain multiple animation
| sequences that each have a name.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Maybe it's British English? I would use the wording like
| that. But I'm German. However, a "benannte
| Animationssequenz" is a perfectly valid construct in
| German, and doesn't sound weird at all given the context.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Uh, that would be a reference to the text at the
| beginning of that section
|
| > Anything that moves is stored in an .ani file which is
| a sprite sheet and named animation sequences.
| adamrezich wrote:
| Yeah they could be indexed rather than named what's
| supposed to be the problem here
| gruez wrote:
| The text looks fine, but the image captions/titles has some
| AI vibes.
| jszymborski wrote:
| What matters more is that it passes as human-written.
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| We don't know, but that's itself a good thing, isn't it? if
| it is not "obvious AI slop" and looks human-written, then
| even if it _was_ AI generated, that would be fine...
| zakupower wrote:
| This stereotype got me laughing
|
| > Goths stay home until 09:00.
| Prunkton wrote:
| 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!
| mdtrooper wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > OpenLoco
|
| To my knowledge this is a recreation in Unity, not a decompile,
| and it was done without AI assistance as it was the goal of the
| developer to learn Unity.
| zomtorg wrote:
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I tend to agree with this perspective however I'd like to point
| out that using token quantity and cost as a measure of
| productivity is counter-intuitive. The variance for a given
| task can be extremely high regardless of the input, not to say
| that there isn't any skill to prompting or that talent doesn't
| matter.
|
| Ultimately it feels pretty similar to using lines of code as a
| measure.
|
| Instead I recommend setting a budget per head and evaluating
| performance traditionally, allowing for exceptions in
| exceptional circumstances of course.
| Geof25 wrote:
| I have noticed that too. Even here on hacker news people are
| bragging to burn through 100usd of tokens per hour while I know
| about friend who has forced Claude Code to write complete MCU
| emulator with peripherals including HSM just from leaked
| firmware and reference manual for less than 50Eur whole
| project.
| jszymborski wrote:
| 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.
| jnmandal wrote:
| Incredible write up. The visuals are amazing
| martinknopf wrote:
| 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.
| cheapcheerful wrote:
| I loved this era of games. Caesar 3 was a favorite. And of course
| RCT1.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| 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.
| likoya wrote:
| 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
| vessenes wrote:
| I'd really love a followup post where you find the highest
| scoring pizza possible -- feels like you must min-max now, yes?
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| - 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
| stamich wrote:
| 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.
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