@coolboymew it doesn't say its a rewrite of the game engine it says it's a static recompilation, meaning that it's going to eventually get taken down by nintendo even if it doesn't include the assets
@sun Huh? The point is that the program takes the rom and extract the assets directly. That's all you need to do with the OOT Ship of Harkenian appimage
@coolboymew I don't know, just saying if it's actually a static recompilation then it's still nintendo code. maybe nintendo doesn't care though but even the rom thing is silly because unless you're dumping the rom yourself...
@rain@coolboymew I'll have to watch this because typically static recompilation across architectures isn't a thing. the code would be putting things into hardware registers that don't exist.
@sun@rain This was entirely why I said back then that Nintendo should take the L and sell it themselves on Steam, along with the source code and original rom. Because the effort to track down every single linked precompiled Mario 64 is just ridiculous at this point
@sun Probably a misunderstanding in the term, because the Mario 64 and OOT one would have been taken down ages ago
And it ain't quite silly because the roms will always be available one way or another, someone will have it. Nintendo took down precompiled ver of Mario 64 really fucking goddamn quick to the point that it's immensely silly
@coolboymew@rain if I worked at nintendo I would consider just stealing their code lol because what are they going to do, sue you for stealing it back?
@coolboymew@rain this isn't without precedent, the original sonic games for windows implemented chunks of the mega drive hardware as software so they could directly port the games. not quite the same as emulation but related. I'm assuming that this is a similar situation.
@rain@sun pretty much. Plus the crazy sales they could be doing and then they could turn Mario 64 into a "Doom" situation, point people on where to get the rom legally and then they can just stop monitoring it as closely
>Tool to statically recompile N64 games into native executables
Crazy, so we have a program that actually does that now? Wow
@coolboymew Yeah I agree 100% because the cat is out of the bag and this is more or less that kind of treatment people have been asking for on these games for years and were willing to pay.
@rain@coolboymew Nintendo giving the devs a license to do what their doing and getting some kind of payment exchange deal would be the best possible scenario for us but nintendo might not ever do that because it would create a hazard of giving the rubber stampp to do that for later hardware
@sun@coolboymew Yea that's kinda how I saw it. Though it seems a lot of projects have way better jumping off points than starting from scratch. I would be far from surprised if we don't see a publisher or two down the road (that is still alive) use this tech to sell us a PC port of a N64 game on Steam
@coolboymew@rain@sun also the reason I mention Ghidra is unlike IDA pro, there's a huge ecosystem of random blokes writing plugins to say load a n64 ROM in.
The reason you're seeing decomp projects and REing intensify in the past 4-5 years alone is no accident, it's because Ghidra exists. Ghidra unlike IDA pro is free, taught everywhere in schools, can import an assload of CPU architectures, and despite it's learning curve is free. Everyone from malware devs to console hackers is using the fuck out of it when back in the day IDA (which you had to pay $$$ for or torrent) was the tool of choice.
@sun@rain IIRC even for the OOT full decompile they're still emulating the sound
But anyways, if they throw it in a decompiler and then manually check everything to make it recompile into a perfect rom, and that's completely legal, I don't see why you couldn't also do it via software like that
@PurpCat@rain@coolboymew when I tried it ida pro was a lot better but probably not in totality when you compare with ghidra being easy to get hold of and people writing plugins as you say.
@sun@rain This is technically further devaluation of retro games by being able to technically making superior ports that the original makers will never provide. I kinda hate lately how a lot of companies are trying to sit their asses on their back assets treating it too much like gold, we went backward in game compilation sizes and bonus games inclusion with other games. It's disappointing
But also, this could be the next step in emulation, which might not be a bad thing. The emulation scene definitively ended up making it possible, probably earlier than it would've happened without. The scene's work, and people, were used for Sega's DC and PC releases IIRC
@rain@coolboymew a third party could absolutely do that. I'm literally just saying that a recompilation is still copyrighted code so only the copyright holder can distribute it or delegate someone else to, not put it on github. I know I sound like a cop I don't want nintendo to take everything down. what I want is when people make this stuff that they understand the law and put it on a server in a foreign country somewhere so they don't get shut down.
What's stopping a 3rd party like Treasure for coming out and just saying "Oh here is Mischief Makers for PC, we just decided to do this!"? Nintendo does not own the right to Mischief Makers and as far as they know its based on whatever source code that had
@sun@rain@coolboymew you can also use ghidra professionally legally instead of having to pirate it, which put IDA in the realm of skids who didn't give a shit and rich kids. A lot of people aren't going to slap on their resume they pirated IDA pro.
Also IDA free is x86/64 only, which kinda sucks if you're an autist trying to break open a video game for an ARM/MIPS/PPC/68k platform, or reverse engineer a car MCU using a SuperH CPU, etc.
@sun@coolboymew Yeah it was IIRC, reminds me of how NES games on the Wii had iNES headers in them or something like that leading to the belief these were roms taken from the internet and not Nintendo's own dump :ac_laughter:
@miscbrains@rain@coolboymew If someone else rips your compiled code to a file you can totally download and use it, if someone came at me for doing that I would just remind them who owns the rom code.
@PurpCat@rain@coolboymew I am barely competent, basically ghidra was really hard to use and ida pro will literally create a flow chart of code for you. I suspect over time ghidra will accumulate more and more good plugins and no one will ever use IDA pro again
@sun@rain@coolboymew I mean I know how petty some companies are. I know how Delphi has a phone home to make sure you're not breaking the license terms, and I know that FL Studio's dev made a YouTuber take down shitposting videos because part of the instruction was piracy tutorials and while it was part of the joke, he also did pirate it for the videos and it showed in the title bar or something. It's also a meme that IIRC you can't open IDA Pro in itself.
Never underestimate the pettiness of corporations in that sphere.
There are a few things IDA Pro has that Ghidra lacks, most notably support for some obscure CPUs in 2024 like Alpha, IA64, i860, the Moto 56k DSP, and more.
@sun@shitposter.world@rain@melonbread.dev@coolboymew@shitposter.world It was just an ultimately nothing burger flash in the pan of internet drama that nintendo was distributing a pirated version of a rom. I'd love it if there was legal recourse of "you get what you deserve" that you could leverage against them, but alas.
This could be very interesting to have this done for all other old consoles. What would be better? Someone having to learn a specific hardware's programming quirks, dive into a game's code, and fuck around with it? Or simply fuck around with it in C?
For Linda³, why wasn't the TG-16 original uncensored version, or the Saturn version with less censorship than the PS1 was chosen for the translation? Well that's simple, there's way more people with PS1 hacking knowledge than TG-16 or Saturn. Apparently there's a single goddamn guy that can work with TG-16 cutscenes to add subs to then, and the guy is picky on what he wants to work on. If the TG-16 or Saturn game could simply be recompiled in C, would any of this be a problem?
@coolboymew@rain@sun also why pc98 translations didn't take off until the last 3-4 years: the debugging situation sucked. Or it's why the recent FM Towns emulator exists, the guy writing it was trying to write a DOS driver to redirect the CD drive to the SCSI port and needed a debugger.
@iceloops@rain@sun My first ever interaction with the game "Punch Out" was downloading "nude Punch Out" when I came across it on a rom site way back then