The blog post reminds me of similar efforts with Shockwave. There's people building decompilers, and runtimes, and if you join enough Discords, you will notice the people in them are cross-contaminating between communities if you will, they share insights with one another, in their efforts towards specific goals. They're hyper focused on making one game or another come back. There's Habbo Hotel, and Coke Studios, as well as other games.
The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.
There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.
Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.
For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:
I have a lot of respect for little communities where people gather to work obsessively over a goal like this. It's fun to see projects like this that would never see this much effort applied if not for the passion of a few dedicated people.
Many of the smartest people I've known got their starts in little communities like these: Obsessively learning new things that would normally be beyond their academic or career level because they need to know something advanced to move their passion project forward.
I'm indirectly involved / hear about a project that buys up old feature phones, mainly from Japan, to try and find ones that have data for old imode games on them, notably a FFVII spinoff called Before Crisis. It's difficult because they would release the game in separate data packs, the idea being people can remove data packs for parts of the game they already played to save space (also a feature on modern smartphone games). But since the servers are long gone, they need to find phones with the data on them to extract it.
Crazy that it has taken so long. I understand these are small teams trudging off in the dark but you could have imagined there would have been more eyes on this and hands tinkering in the time when the Xbox 360 was being sold than today. Right at that same time in history the iPhone was getting cracked basically every iOS release, sometimes by teenagers. Seems like there were a ton of hackers around back then.
These projects are really neat. Last week, I was able to build (and play) the Xbox 360 release of Sonic Unleashed on a couple of ARM SBCs using Sonic Unleashed Recomp.
Years ago I was searching for why emulators don't recompile to native bytecode and it seemed like the consensus at the time was that JIT etc was faster. I can't find it now, but IIRC I remember replies from maintainers saying it was a bad idea.
What changed since then, since this seems to be a trend? Is this more for more modern systems that have more static code?
Very nice. It’d be interesting if recomps of some games that were originally for both 360 and PC become the superior experience… Fable 3 and the whole Games for Windows Live nonsense the PC version had come to mind.
I wonder whether this "recompilation" technology could be used to run Windows software on Linux, as an alternative/complementary technique to Wine.
Back in the day (year 2000, until 10-15 years ago) we had Project Odin to dynamically translate Windows software to run on OS/2:
https://github.com/netlabsorg/odin32
Windows and Linux run on the same x86 CPU architecture, you don't need to recompile anything. What WINE does is to translate/replace system calls and libraries.
I know how Wine works, thank you. I've used winelib in the past to port Windows software (that I had the source code of) to Linux myself.
My point is the way wine works today is:
WinAPI --> winelib --> Linux --> x86
I. e. winelib is reimplementing WineAPI on top of Linux.
What if we could just decompile those Windows functions and recompile them on Linux, or even x86, directly?
The workaround all of these console recompilation projects use is you must have the original game in order to have the binaries (the ones you theoretically decompile and recompile, but actually you take pre-decompiled-recompiled ones by someone else) and assets (graphics, sounds, etc). For Windows applications on Linux, we could do the same: bring your own Windows, then we can decompile and recompile.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 38.3 ms ] threadThe Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.
There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.
Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.
For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:
https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs
Many of the smartest people I've known got their starts in little communities like these: Obsessively learning new things that would normally be beyond their academic or career level because they need to know something advanced to move their passion project forward.
But they've made really good progress in recent years, to the point that the game is now playable. Not sure if it's complete, but it's playable. See e.g. https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/work-begins-on-restor... for info.
The positive term for this is cross-polinating
Some exciting stuff has already happened in the week since I wrote the interview. Here's Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kih42KlocII
What changed since then, since this seems to be a trend? Is this more for more modern systems that have more static code?
Back in the day (year 2000, until 10-15 years ago) we had Project Odin to dynamically translate Windows software to run on OS/2: https://github.com/netlabsorg/odin32
My point is the way wine works today is: WinAPI --> winelib --> Linux --> x86
I. e. winelib is reimplementing WineAPI on top of Linux.
What if we could just decompile those Windows functions and recompile them on Linux, or even x86, directly?
The workaround all of these console recompilation projects use is you must have the original game in order to have the binaries (the ones you theoretically decompile and recompile, but actually you take pre-decompiled-recompiled ones by someone else) and assets (graphics, sounds, etc). For Windows applications on Linux, we could do the same: bring your own Windows, then we can decompile and recompile.