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?
In: 1563
The problem word in that sentence is “just”. No, they can’t “just” datamine the source code. Something vaguely equivalent can be done, but it’s hard, skilled, and labour-intensive – which means expensive. Konami probably felt it was cheaper and more feasible to redo it from scratch than to atttempt to recover the original.
The original source code would have had meanigful names for things like variables and subroutines. It would have had comments explaining in plain language what the code at any particular point is doing, and things like what values input can take, and why things aren’t done a different way. And it would have been structured in a way that made it easy for humans to read and understand. Whereas the compiled code would have none of that. And it’s necessarily a close match. Not only would you lose all the names and comments, but the compiler would quite likely have shuffled things around to optimise the resulting code for execution. It might even have changed precisely how things are done in places into something functionally equivalent.
So, yes, you can pass the code through a program to partially reverse the process (a decompiler) and get a written version of the actual code. But what comes out won’t look anything like what originally went in. if you’re going to want to change ANYTHING, you’re going to have to go through that line by line, work out what areas in storage represent what, what each single instruction actually represents, restrucure the result to be useable, and so on. The people who wrote the code will have a better chance than people who’re unfamiliar with it, but if they’re actually still available to do it, rather than moved on to other things or even out the company, you’re lucky. And there’s a LOT of code. So basically what you have is the mother of all crossword puzzles. It’s going to take a lot of effort, and tie up skilled people. As a business you have to decide on whether it’s worth it, or whether there’s perhaps another approach.
Latest Answers