Do I understand what a decompilation or a recompilation is? Absolutely not. There are enough of them happening and continue to happen that we should have a distinct thread to say “new one.” With a youtube video.
If you are out of the loop what this means is an old console game now runs natively on PC.
For my part I’ve played Sonic Unleashed this way, and it was great. I only needed to use two propreitary programs to change the music.
I am also casually playing Jak 2 this way. There are some inconsistencies, but it works well enough.
If I hadn’t played Ocarina recently I’d probably be interested in the Ocarina or Majora comps. There is a comp of Goemon 64 the 3D one and progress on Goemon 64 the 2D one. I’d play that game at a good frame rate.
What’s been the big jump that makes this all possible?
With the early N64 efforts, I recall hearing the certain games didn’t have encrypted ROMs so they were easy to decompile then someone just had to do the hard work of figuring out uncommented code and porting the system specific calls to SDL or whatever.
I had no idea they were doing this with PS2 and GameCube games now too.
In my casual exposure I am not sure exactly because it is a wide array of titles (I hope the answer isn’t vibes, but suspect it is for like Final Fantasy X.)
Ghidra was publicly released back in 2019. Disassemblers have existed for a long time before that (eg IDA Pro), but Ghidra was a significant step above the competition and available for free. It’s easily the best thing the NSA has ever done, by a long shot.
Beyond that, it’s just a snowballing social effect. Some nerds have had this as a hobby for a while, so they’ve made a bunch of useful tools and inroads to other platforms, which attracts more nerds to the hobby.
anyhow, wake me up when someone does virtual hydlide
oh shit theres a Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon/Ganbare Goemon: Neo Momoyama Bakufu no Odori re/decomp?? ive been playing all those games and totally wouldve used that lol oh well
yeah a couple months ago i played the Majora’s Mask comp (i don’t understand the difference in prefixes sorry help) and it ruled, i like being able to mod out the annoying parts of a dated game that i already know i love and then shove in stupid mods that let me play as a girl and wear sunglasses instead of the bomb mask and do a dab every time i set it off. and have crisp FPS + full RS camera control the whole time
i also have fucked around with Super Mario 64 Co-Op DX which is obv a multiplayer-focused fork of the SM64 comp. i played thru most of the game as an FPS and shot King Bowser Koopa to death with a revolver it was good clean fun
both of those were really easy to plug-and-play with mods and all, ive seen some intriguing but less currently refined ones that i couldnt wrap my head around installing
Oh yeah and the Sonic Unleashed one which just let me play that game at all! cuz fuck knows it can’t be emulated. i should try to install the transfem Sonic mod
Decompilation is turning the application (game) back into the code that was compiled to make it. Its basically un-baking a cake to get the recipe.
Recompilation is taking that decompiled code (recipe) and recompiling (baking) it except now with the nintendo specific ingredients replaced with pc specific ingredients so a computer can eat it. Yum.
The ones i have used have the Nintendo owned stuff like textures removed so you have to source a rom to get them. A pain but it makes them legal to distribute.
Aaanyway i have the Starfox 64 and Bomberman 64 recomps and they are really really nice. Goemon 64 would be a dream.
I know there are a few n64 efforts one is a tool that can decompile any n64 game but then you have to modify the code to recompile sucessfully. Previously I believe recompilers had to rely on leaked source. Im a year or so behinde on the story.
one of the wildest things ive seen from decompilation (thanks for the skinny, shnozlak) is putting [Super] Mario [64] in other games, physics and all, e.g. this saltydkdan video
as a counterpoint to that: the other day someone popped in a decomp server i’m in and farted a bunch of AI contributions onto a project, and that was enough for the lead contributors to finally make a rule banning LLM output.
still, yeah, there’s way too much vibe coding in retrogaming spaces — i hate it
