Would really like to know what makes a person (or group of people) invest the time and energy to do this? Is there a group of hobbyist gamers who work on titles they love? Is it about digital conservation?
Preservation and ease of modification. New console units are not being made anymore, and the number of old ones is limited, they can break, and there is an issue with output video formats that are incompatible with modern monitors/TVs. There is emulation, but it's not perfect and can be demanding. Decompilations enable people to create native binaries for different platforms. This makes playing the game easier and more accessible.
I gave a talk at Game On Expo about decompiling Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (https://github.com/xeeynamo/sotn-decomp ) earlier this year and talked a little bit about exactly this. Almost everyone who works on loves the game. After that, motivation varies: some want to see ports, some want to mod, some want to learn everything they can, some want to preserve. Along with those I also like the challenge (not unlike sudoku).
Doing it long enough requires learning compiler history and theory, understanding business and engineering pressures of making the game, and occasionally reveals why parts of the game work the way they do.
I'm the person who reimplemented Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (DOS, 1992) and my original reasoning was a desire to know how it was able to do some of the graphical tricks it did on such underpowered hardware (it could run on an IBM AT). The game wasn't anything special by any metric, but it was an important piece of my childhood and I felt an attachment to it. I also learned a hell of a lot about the PC platform, the C ecosystem from the 80s, and my own tastes as an engineer.
It's 100% decompiled to C, but not fully labelled yet. That means there's lots it's auto-generated names all over the place. It would be interesting to see someone try to port it now though.
I’m not sure if EFF has made any statements about it, but I would be concerned with the copyright aspects. Decompilation works (legally) because a new creative work is being produced.
It would be easy to argue LLMs are producing derivative, non-transformative works. AI companies have not made that any easier by paying publishers huge royalties to license training data.
I personally would stay away from it to avoid the risk, but I’d imagine if it became “easy” enough to produce a matching decomp with an LLM, we would get a more specific legal precedent pretty quickly.
And people who play Chinese retro handhelds must dump their own ROMs. Unless they bought a 10000 in 1 version for $10 extra, in which case it's all perfectly legal!
Sure, you must, I guess, but is anyone really going to jail over this piece of ancient history? I find these disclaimers cute.
A quick inspection of the repo indicates that it doesn’t contain any copyrighted material. They’ve just uploaded the code to perform the decompilation.
Zero Hour was one of the must have's of the Nintendo 64 era and one of the few good games in the latter part of the Duke Nukem series. Despite its challenging platforming and a few soul-crushing levels, the game had consistently rich settings and managed to recreate that Duke 3D charm.
The recent Perfect Dark port was incredible and I hope this decomp gets the same treatment.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 60.5 ms ] threadNote: To use this repository, you must already own a copy of the game."
Doing it long enough requires learning compiler history and theory, understanding business and engineering pressures of making the game, and occasionally reveals why parts of the game work the way they do.
I stream working on SotN and am happy to answer any questions in chat if you’re interested in learning more - https://m.twitch.tv/madeupofwires/home
https://github.com/smitelli/cosmore
https://cosmodoc.org/
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been getting farther along as well https://decomp.dev/zeldaret/tp
It would be easy to argue LLMs are producing derivative, non-transformative works. AI companies have not made that any easier by paying publishers huge royalties to license training data.
I personally would stay away from it to avoid the risk, but I’d imagine if it became “easy” enough to produce a matching decomp with an LLM, we would get a more specific legal precedent pretty quickly.
..since how long? I've lost track (:
Sure, you must, I guess, but is anyone really going to jail over this piece of ancient history? I find these disclaimers cute.
The recent Perfect Dark port was incredible and I hope this decomp gets the same treatment.