When a game’s “code is lost” what stops a company from dumping/decompiling code from a disk or cartridge copy of the game for things like remakes and remasters?
In: Technology
You can’t really decompile code. Compiling takes human readable code and turns it into something a computer understands. A lot of what makes code human readable (comments, white space, variable names, function calls, etc.) is useless to the computer running it though. So all of that has to go. It’s just thrown away, there’s no trace of what originally made it readable left in the final product. You might be able to undo it to an extent, but, without that original information, what you get from decompiling wouldn’t actually look anything like the original code you compiled (even if it would perform the same functions).
Nobody likes working on code they didn’t write (I barely even like working on the code I did write), even if it’s pretty well commented and written. Its almost always a huge pain trying to figure out what exactly the coder had in mind, and trace through how everything works. Now take out anything that would help the code make sense to somebody who didn’t write it, and what you’re left with is basically as hard to figure out as just writing the code over from scratch anyway.
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