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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That’s not how source code works.
Computers (including video game consoles) only understand instructions in the form of machine code. Machine code is really hard for humans to write and understand, so we invented higher-level programming languages. These languages are easy for humans to read and write, and are then translated by a program called a “compiler” into machine code which the computer can run, called an “executable” or “binary.”
The source code is the original, human-readable code which might be written in a language like C or Python or Java or something. But it’s the executable that gets copied onto game disks and sold on the market. It’s usually virtually impossible to decompile an executable into the original source code.
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