I hear often that games can’t be remade because the source code is lost. Silent Hill 2 remake had only partial source code. Wouldn’t any old physical CD have the entire code on it?
In: Technology
High level code is compiled into instructions to be fed to the processor. That’s the binary, the executable (.exe). It’s indistinguishable from its original form and can’t be translated back. Compilers perform a ton of optimizations along the way too which make the result more efficient, but even further from its original form.
Decompilers exist but it’s not a silver bullet. They take the compiled binary and generally output C code (even if the game was written in another language). It’s a best guess, and the optimizations done in the compilation make the result extremely cryptic.
I’ve reverse engineered game binaries and it’s very difficult to interpret the result. It can take weeks for me to interpret parts even when I have a good idea what they’re doing. I’ve spent years on one game and that was just to understand key parts of it, not to flesh out workable source code from it.
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