Decompiling Xbox games using PDB debug info
i686.me
i686.me
- Splinter Cell
- Deus Ex
- Thief
- Civ
This is great work and will help tell the story of how these games were made.
It would be great if all games after a certain period of time were opensourced like some companies are doing:
https://github.com/electronicarts
https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games?tab=readme-ov-fi...
I would settle for simple copyright expiration in a reasonable amount of time. 70 years after death of author is so wholly unreasonable. Even though so many IPs are now part of the collective cultural consciousness, people can't explore their creativity using them without threat of getting Nintendo'd (even for non-commercial projects!), and entire generations that grew up experiencing them will be dead and gone by the time they enter public domain. It is a travesty that we impose such heavy shackles on human creativity.
With anything else (books or stories, pictures or movies, etc) the ability to modify or extend the work was the default. Copyright was a carve-out in this.
With software it's actually the reverse--the ability to modify or extend the work is _not_ the default. It takes explicit action by the creator to make that reasonable without substantial effort in most cases. We're actually dealing with an entirely different situation here, and providing that exclusivity on top really does seem like a bad deal for society in a lot of ways.
Is there anything else that's covered by copyright that's in a similar sort of situation as software? Where the thing that's covered by copyright _isn't_ really modifiable to begin with?
Which is a lot of words to say--on the surface, yeah, I agree with you. Besides shorter terms, I think if you want that exclusivity from society you should be required to give something back in return... like the source code so everyone can benefit from and build off of your work after your period of exclusivity expires.
I don't see how software is unique here. You can modify a compiled executable, just like you can modify a finished graphic, or a produced movie, or a piece of music from an album. It takes additional effort, but so does modifying the graphic without the PSD file, the movie without the editor project files, and the music without the stems.
It's only been in the 20th century that we've increasingly seen classes of copyrightable works for which the source code dwarfs the final released product: music, digital visual arts, film, and software
To make matters even worse, the commercial interest in copyright doesn't care about any of this, because pirates only duplicate and distribute the end product anyway. So it's only the creative side wanting to remix and extend that is shut out by a lack of source escrow.
If the code and assets were escrowed, the rightsholder could just go claim that stuff whenever they need it.
It feels like tool devs target byte editting more than refactoring decompiled code into something readable - you can't move lines of code, can't flip statement checked in if() for early return
Author of this article mentioned "byte euivalence", and while I'd be fine with functional sameness, I imagine provably-reversible refactor steps would be of great help for everyone
I've tried Ghidra, IDA and BinaryNinja, and all of them display code on the level of "C with classes" from early 00s (and declaration of variables at the beginning of function in style of structured programming of the 90s)
I'd be perfectly fine with that output, had there been good way to interactively fix it (refactor without changing behaviour)
I had no idea you were an (ex?) sysadmin! Apologies for the offtopic driveby reply, but what a small world we live in.