Decomp Academy teaches PowerPC reverse engineering by grading your C against a 2001 compiler

Decomp Academy is an interactive course that teaches the craft of matching decompilation — reconstructing C source that compiles, instruction for instruction, into the exact bytes of a shipped binary. The target is GameCube software, specifically Star Fox Adventures, and the twist is that submissions are graded live by the original Metrowerks CodeWarrior PowerPC compiler (mwcceppc.exe). You read disassembled assembly, write C, and the real 2001 toolchain confirms whether your code reproduces the original byte-for-byte.

The 254-lesson curriculum scales from absolute basics to production code. Early units drill the fundamental shapes a compiler emits — arithmetic idioms, bit manipulation via PowerPC’s rlwinm/rlwimi family, control flow, loops, loads and stores, pointers, structs, and the quirks of float versus double handling. Later sections cover the real ABI: stack frames, register allocation, the small data area for globals, optimizer behaviors like instruction scheduling and peephole dot-form merging, jump tables, and 64-bit emulation through register pairs. A final ‘proving ground’ has learners match actual SFA functions end to end.

The project is notable as a teaching tool for a niche but active discipline. Matching decompilation underpins game preservation efforts, fan ports, and modding, yet it has historically been learned through scattered tribal knowledge. Structuring it as a graded, progressive course — with the authentic compiler as the arbiter rather than an approximation — lowers the barrier to a skill that otherwise takes years to pick up, and ties directly into the live SFA-Decomp community project supplying the functions.