Recompilation: A New Way to Keep N64 Games Alive [video] | Hacker News Reader

Recompilation: A New Way to Keep N64 Games Alive [video]

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42 pointsfarmerbb9 comments

Couldn't this be considered more like an en-bedabble HLE emulator? The high level aspect is much more sophisticated than we've previously seen which allows for all those enhancements and better integration with the host system, plus all sorts of (I imagine) warpers to make the recompiled code work on the host system, which is kind like an emulator. Or maybe more like WINE + recompiled code.

And of course, as noted in the video, the hard part of reverse engineering is still there, so you still have to figure out the meaning of each piece of code and give it proper symbols, but now you have this really nice pre-generated scaffold all around it :)

I would love for official re-releases and remasters to be made with this method. I'm not sure about N64 titles, but I know many developers have lost the original sourcecode to beloved classic games. This had lead to a lot of re-releases either simply being an emulator, or being a complete port not based on original code. Star Ocean 3 is an example of a game being re-released as an emulated game, and it suffers from unexpected crashes and in general offers no big improvement over playing the original game. Final Fantasy 8 Remaster is based on the steam port, which was based on the original PC port. Some basic functionality, such as full analog movement (instead of 8 directions) is missing, and in general the game behaves somewhat differently than the original PS version.

We are getting many low effort rereleases. I almost never buy them because the original versions are just as good or better, and I own a great upscaler. I would love to see companies use these methods to make better re-releases.

Downloading random exes from the internet is real scary. Jamming this into another tool feels like a better way to go.

You are just kicking the can down the road. Then the tool would be the same random exe attack vector. Even then, if the tool is designed to run random game code then the gamecode is still an attack vector.

Trust in software is a huge issue, but that is a totally separate conversation.

The difference is, you can audit the emulator once and verify that you have the correct original game binary. You can't audit unique binary files generated without code nearly the same way.

I understood that they'll release the source for the decompiled project, so you can build it yourself or compare hashes.

Of course it would be a lot easier to hide malicious code in such a decompiled mess of symbols.

Almost everything people use are exe's from the internet.

Raytracing builds look surprisingly good! Meshes well with the artstyle.

Umm, the tool converts the code to C, but doesn't include any of the code (which is a copyrighted asset) and you have to select the code (the ROM) in order to run?

Yeah, that's not how that works.

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