> How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean room and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary software?
In Nintendo console hacking scenes? None at all, there is no point to it, going through the hassle of doing cleanroom as an individual is wasted effort.
Though, the spectrum between copy-pasting HexRays output verbatim and rewriting things yourself is fairly large.
The Nintendo 64 homebrew scene uses libdragon which is 100% clean room, 100% based on reverse engineering, is fully open source and allows to create ROMs with no proprietary libraries.
In Nintendo console hacking scenes? None at all, there is no point to it, going through the hassle of doing cleanroom as an individual is wasted effort.
Though, the spectrum between copy-pasting HexRays output verbatim and rewriting things yourself is fairly large.