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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

A lot of newer games probably include middleware licensed from other companies that make relicensing more challenging

And also, art assets - I've touched on this briefly with an older game from the studio where I work, and basically we could probably release the source code, but since it was a racing game we couldn't release the art assets as they are copyrighted by car manufacturers(or at least it would be a significantly complicated legal problem to not be worth the time).

I believe that's standard and well-understood; Quake's source code has famously been GPL for decades (thanks, Carmack!), but all the data files (e.g. art assets) remain copyrighted.

You can always release the game with some generic art and offer the copyrighted assets in a shop. With some luck the game becomes popular and people add further assets to your shop. Demand some commission and you may have created a cash cow.

Sure, but this particular game was from the late 90s - we looked at re-exporting some of the assets and I have no idea how you'd even approach it without significant time investment, the tools used to make the original art no longer exist(we have the source code for the game, but not for the tools used at the time, I've gone through stacks of old CDs that had backups and 9/10 discs were just gone, completely corrupted), or used hardware that would be difficult to source(like cutscenes made on silicon graphics machines, there is no good way to edit and export these project files on modern machines)

As a former SGI user, I'm afraid we'll never see emulation happen.

SGI emulation has been a thing since the late 90's with SimOS (console only though) and more recently with MAME (full support for Irix desktop) as well as user space emulation with qemu-irix.

I'm running a Irix 6.2 desktop on my PC right now.

Also fun fact: up to version 6 of the MIPS port of NetBSD, you could run Irix binaries. I'm pretty sure it can boot in qemu-mips which would be another avenue for some ability to run certain Irix software on PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software

For some reason this has completely bypassed me! I've been taking care of my Octane and Indigo2 so I can open my old PA and SI|3D files.. I will definitely look at this.

I’ve got a top-spec Octane2 with all the development tools that’s languishing and needs to be put to work.

I’m sure I’m not the only one (though the number is vanishingly small). It’s difficult to know how large the community is without nekochan.

Hope springs eternal. :)

Car manufacturers are also specifically notorious for being terrible counterparties in any negotiation

I'd say go for it and release just the source code, no assets. If there's enough people with the time and passion to recreate/replace the assets, they will. If not, no harm done :)

This is why the original Doom (1992) source release had no sound, for example.

Bink Video is another common obstacle for games from the mid-to-late-'90s.

> A lot of newer games probably include middleware licensed from other companies that make relicensing more challenging

Commonly Physics Engines, like Havok and others.

Also, the SDKs for console ports may be under NDA. I’m looking at you, Nintendo Switch.

Microsoft XBox, Sony Playstation, this is not unique to Nintendo.

No real reason to call nintendo out here, every console i know of has been that way for many generations.

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