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Comment by reassembled | Hacker News Reader

Just this week a PC port of the 360 version of Sonic Unleashed was released that was accomplished via static recompilation techniques. It plays flawlessly and is really quite an impressive release. If this is possible now then emulation of these consoles might not be the only avenue to preserving their history.

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There's no meaningful technological difference between what that static recompilation tool can do for you vs. what hacking up Xenia can. I'd also hazard a guess that that port's GitHub repo will get DMCA'd eventually, and rightfully so.

I really don't know why people keep doing this to themselves and to the communities they claim to love. This is about as far from a clean-room reimplementation and porting effort as humanly possible. It's not a forward-thinking, sustainable preservation effort at all.

Yes, but the graphics system for the game was completely reworked by people familiar with Sega's proprietary Hedgehog Engine. A straight recompile would have been unplayable.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I suspect many casual observers don’t either. So you’re suggesting they did this work with proprietary info they’d gained through work with Sega and thus broke their NDA?

Not necessarily -- a lot of external hobbyist work has gone into reverse-engineering Sonic Generations, which has an official PC port and is based on the same engine as Unleashed.

Funnily enough, one of the most famous Generations mods is a project that ports over a bunch of levels from Unleashed. IIRC they changes the graphics pipeline to look and work more like the Unleashed one, too.

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