I’ve heard many times that the reason the Silent Hill remaster collection didn’t turn out so well was because Konami lost the original source code and had to re-create it. But I don’t understand how that is possible. If they were selling copies of Silent Hill, why couldn’t they just take a single disk of it and datamine the source code off of it? How could they possess the game without possessing the game’s source code?
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“Source code” means many things. It includes text files of one or more computer languages, libraries of precompiled functionality (these often come with a Software Development Kit for a particular language), and various support files. For example, a makefile is essential instructions for how to put together the various pieces to yield the finished product, precompiling code files, then linking the resulting object files with library code in a specific way.
The makefile is essential to the process, and there’s no trace of it in the finished software. It’s also completely dependent on the linker being used.
The object code can indeed be de-compiled (there are commercial decompilers for popular languages) but the result is difficult to understand. For example, computer programs make widespread use of *variables,* pieces of data that contain a value. Variables are usually given meaningful names to make the code readable, for example dCurrentDate. The variable names are stripped away when compiled to object code, replaced by numeric references. So de-compiled code is missing all of the variable name cues that help to understand what is going on.
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