Black & White

A work-in-progress decompilation of Lionhead's Black & White.

• Reverse Engineering Wiki
• Black & White Patches

Dependencies

CMake downloads and uses a patched LLVM for assembly, linking, and a few other compilation steps. This is handled automatically at configure time.

Linux

sudo apt install cmake ninja-build mingw-w64 libc6-dev-i386-cross python3
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r scripts/source_code/requirements.txt

macOS

brew install cmake ninja mingw-w64 python3
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r scripts/source_code/requirements.txt

Windows

Install CMake, Ninja, and Python 3, then:

python -m venv .venv && .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r scripts/source_code/requirements.txt

Building

# Byte-exact reimplementation
cmake --workflow --preset release

# With debug symbols (for Ghidra, IDA Pro, live debugging)
cmake --workflow --preset relwithdebinfo

Building the release preset prints an md5 checksum to confirm the result is byte-for-byte identical:

md5sum	version
174b1a64e74b2321f3c38ccc8a511e78	1.20 with no cd

Diffing with objdiff

objdiff lets you compare decompiled functions against the original object files interactively.

# Generate the objdiff build and config
python configure_objdiff.py

# Then open objdiff pointed at the build directory
objdiff --project-dir cmake-build-presets/objdiff

Source

The src/ directory contains the decompilation source:

• src/asm/ — assembly source for functions not yet decompiled to C/C++
  • src/asm/unprocessed/ — raw unprocessed assembly; files named runblack.reassemble.* are the main .text sections
• src/staging/ — C/C++ stubs used as the "base" side in objdiff comparisons

Data section files:

• rdata.asm — read-only data (function pointers, vtables)
• data.asm — read-write data (function pointers, RTTI structs)
• data1.asm — read-write data (likely from static linking)
• SELFMOD.asm — executable section (possibly SafeDisc related)
• rsrc.asm — resource data (icons etc.), built with cvtres from VS97

Debug Symbols

The relwithdebinfo preset produces a PDB with globals, function definitions, and struct definitions usable in Ghidra and IDA Pro. Pre-built artifacts are available on the Actions page.

For live debugging, build with relwithdebinfo and launch with the working directory set to the original game files directory (where runblack.exe lives).

Contributing

1. Pick a function from src/asm/ and decompile it to C/C++
2. Use objdiff (see above) to verify your output matches the original object code
3. Open a pull request — the CI will confirm the md5 still matches