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
decompilation is not a perfect process especially on really old games where the original devs likely stripped all debugging symbols(hooks where you can associate variable names to memory as the name suggests used for debugging) to save space.
in this case a dump/decompilation will be guess work at best where you’ll end up with code that likely will work about aswell as the original, but it will be near impossible to maintain as all non essential information simply isn’t there anymore(stuff like comments simplified data structures etc..). this is clearly not the level of material you need ot remake a game with modern tech.
also “code” isn’t just necessarily the game logic, this also include stuff like the original assets that in the retail version are compressed/redone to be compliant with the engine limitations often meaning original quality/model readability/sound quality is just gone and trying to upscale this is a waste of time and effort where it’s arguably easy to remake from scratch(which brings the last point remaking these assets might not be possible anymore due to “life”).
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