Posted by GaggiX 3 days ago
Useful, but complements existing tooling & falls short on the hard part
I work on Ship of Harkinian. We're sering more vibed libultraship ports. Yet to see a real success
Fundamentally, decompilation is not solving a technical problem most of the time (because the source already exists somewhere) but a social one (that the owner doesn't want to release it).
I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:
Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.
We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
> We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.
Have you looked at any rediscovered repositories lately?
It's a pretty daft assumption that the original source code wouldn't carry more value than the decompiled machine-generated "source code". And much more so.
Certainly from the game historian's perspective. Just think about it. Inline comments, logs, scraps of documents/notes, variable/function naming, scrapped files and artwork, engine code, etc. These things are essentially a time capsule treasure and a peek into the history of the game, no matter their state.
If you've seen any rediscovered source code releases of old software, e.g. 86-DOS, Prince of Persia, Command & Conquer, Little Big Adventure, even Apollo or any of the "the making of"-style game releases built around it (Karateka, Ninja Turles) you'd probably think differently. These are super interesting to dive into because they capture the thoughts and decisions of the developers at the time.
Here are also some interesting articles to showcase what that means: https://gamehistory.org/category/source-code/
The source code they were given for the job was so specific to the assembler, compiler, build stack and internal company libraries and SDKs (which often they had no access to) that reverse engineering the final game was usually the quickest route.
> Certainly from the game historian's perspective.
That's a completely different topic, and I mean, sure - from an historical perspective it's absolutely essential, even simple changelogs become of enormous importance.
Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion.
Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path.
Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous.
Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.
Completely agreed. But even if the will was there, how do we know the source code even exists? 1999 was a long time ago. Source code is company IP. Generally it's the devs who write it and care enough to want to release it to the masses or archive it properly. But they are not the decision makers. There are too many stories of source code quite literally disappearing despite the devs best efforts. A lot of the times when we do get access to source code it comes from rogue behavior aka a former dev putting their ass on the line for the community (see the recent MGS leak on 4chan).
Also like a sibling comment has stated there is no guarantee that the code would be a in a usable format. With the crazy crunch culture in game dev, I doubt most of these studios from the 90s were pumping out clean code. Like an archaeology dig, you'd have to budget a non-trivial amount of time getting what you find in a state that is useable by modern standards.
All to say, I think reversing these older games is a worthy endeavor that is not going away anytime soon. I for one, am excited by the productivity benefits that AI tools have brought with them.
Reverse engineering is (luckily) OK, but reproducing (or, well, releasing) the actual original code with the help of decompilation isn't really allowed, is it?
HEY, it was a GREAT game, but GREATEST? COME ON, this ain't no goldeneye