I don't know if people realize this, but coding agents are actually fairly good at reverse-engineering binary files. I suspect that a large number of academic papers on reverse-engineering and decompilation techniques is helping here, but regardless of what the magic is, it's quite impressive.

I recently tested this by having Claude Code reverse-engineer the extract the exact chess engine used in The Chessmaster, a game by Hi-Tech Expressions, the Nintendo Game Boy version.

Look at how cool the box art was: https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/images/17780-the-chessmaster

 

Check it out here:

https://halferty.github.io/thechessmaster-js/