A decompilation and port of Sonic Advance 2-a GameBoy Advance game written in C

Agreed, when Sonic Mania came along I often heard “the first 2D Sonic game since 3+K” and thought that people were forgetting the advance series. You could tell they were crafted by a team that respected the feel of the games that came before and understood that Sonic was a solid platformer with speed as a reward gameplay mechanic. Not to mention it had a colour palette that never confused the main character from the background, something I think mania gets wrong from time to time.

>Ocarina of Time is able to play natively on just about every system system imagineable (pretty sure native PS1 builds exist)

You got me curious so I googled it, are you confusing it with a port for the Playstation Classic? Thats a modern console that uses a Android phone chip and emulates the PS1. I couldn't find any references to the original PS1 and I don't think any amount of wizard coding could get that game to run on such a resource constrained hardware. There is so much of that game that was only possible on N64 level hardware or better.

Probably most source code has been lost. Games were considered throwaway projects, executives barely knew what source code was, and game dev work was considered entry-level and low-status. The main source of 80s and early 90s code that we have are floppy disks that developers took home rather than the companies that published the games.

Consider that version control was something that was basically only used by Unix developers back then. E.g. DOOM, with a particularly technically proficient team, was developed by passing disks with source files around.

If this were Nintendo then I’d agree but sega have always been really chilled about this so long as the community does t profit off their IP (which is a fair line to draw).

Because of this, you’ll fine tonnes of Sega fan stuff. From multiple active Phantasy Star Online servers through to entire fan-made Sonic games.

In fact iirc Sonic Mania started life as a fan game and Sega asked them to produce a full game.

Do you wanna develop that tool? The sprite and midi extraction is pretty complex in this game, it was much easier for us to extract them by hand and then in the future we will produce something which extracts them automatically. Until we have that tooling in place we don't plan to release any binaries.

SEGA seems to always have been a lot more generous with this kind of thing... Much of the disassembly or decompilation projects I've seen come out of old SEGA games include all the assets with them (e.g. look up disassemblies for the Genesis games), and ROM hacks are typically distributed as full ROMs - I've basically never seen SEGA use the DMCA against any disassemblies/decompilations/ROM hacks.

Dimps developed a "game engine" of sort for their GBA games. As far as I understand SA1 was the first implementation of this engine and then they iterated upon it for their future games. It's an extremely minimal engine, implements some helpers for rendering sprites and backgrounds, and a task system (since the GBA doesn't have threading or any task system in it's SDK).

You can see this SDK in the root of the src, everything in game was written specifically for the Sonic Advance trilogy.

They might have used some middleware, but GBA had no SDK I believe.

It didn't. The Java port is an entirely different source. Essentially a re-write.

For matching decompilations like this, pretty terrible. It can give a rough layout of a function with some branching, but it fails to create reasonable human like structs (which have to be inferred from the assembly), and matching what it has created can be the majority of the work. We did this without any AI assistance, but I relied on the Ghidra decompilation feature for outlining a functions layout (though even that had it's limitations).

The training data is just too minimal for this sort of thing. The decomp.me database would probably be really good to train a model on.

The tooling has become somewhat mature, and the community is growing so there are more experts to help out when you are stuck. For example, this project relied heavily on the tooling developed to decompile the Pokemon GBA games.

https://decomp.me perhaps?

Where would you like it to be distributed for an old GameBoy game?