It’s been a while.

Life has been harrowing lately, but you’re not here for that. Besides, not enough was happening in delinking land to warrant a dedicated post, so I figured I might roll everything up into one update.

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

My decompilation/reverse-engineering project is still on hiatus, although something did happen.

Back in August 2024, I received an email inquiring about level geometry and freecam. Fast forward a couple of weeks and Sir Rando released a YouTube video with a challenge run for completing the game as Rikimaru without using his sword. You can watch the video here:

The video features in-game B-roll footage with a freecam. I’ve retrofitted this feature into the game with the power of delinking, by replacing the function in charge of the camera with a modified one that gives manual control of it, and keeping the rest of the game’s original code.

Unfortunately, since I stopped at fully delinking Rittai Ninja Katsugeki Tenchu, the two extra levels from the later releases couldn’t benefit from this freecam mod, but the end result still looks nice.

ghidra-delinker-extension

My extension is still snowballing out of control, steadily.

I’ve addressed some tech-debt and released version 0.7.0 back in July 2025. The biggest achievement was refactoring the relocation table from tracking symbol names to tracking target addresses. This solved a whole bunch of problems around symbol name conflicts and symbol name priorization, a feature that picks mangled symbols if available rather than the primary one.

Alongside major improvements in logging and error handling, the extension no longer requires divination (or debugging) to troubleshoot issues with it, meaning that the everyday reverse-engineer has a fighting change of using it successfully.

The extension seems to have carved a niche for itself in video game decompilation for Windows games. I’ve mentored a fair number of people who reached out to me about using it, with a wide variety of use-cases.

I have second-hand hearsay that my extension is spreading by word of mouth and is being used by people that haven’t reached out to me, but except for download stats (245 downloads for 0.7.0 at the time of writing), I don’t really have any hard data about it.

Yet another sober outburst on Hacker News

I know, I know, I really should stop being baited into writing those… Alas, I’ve managed to nail the top comment of a story that stayed at the top of the feed for a while about, fittingly enough, reinventing the wheel.

Two comments from this thread are notable, the first one being:

In my almost 15 years in this community this is the first comment where I don’t have a fucking clue of what is described.

elorant

Best Hacker News comment of all times as far as I’m concerned, right after this one:

Pretty awesome work!

WalterBright

That’s from Walter Bright. The Walter Bright.

I guess I know now how it feels when a living legend gives you a thumbs up.

That’s all?

Oh no, I did not unearth this blog and titled this post like so just for that. Remember when I said that ghidra-delinker-extension was snowballing out of control last year?

I had no idea.

You’ll read all about it in in my next post… as soon as I get back home from abroad.