alt Hacker NewsAwesome, but I always wondered why so much effort was put into decompiling this? Seems like a meme for meme's sake.
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Why not? Many folks feel an itch to play a certain nostalgic game that few others enjoyed. And they want to make it even better, especially as our expectations have grown over time.
I prefer 1080 as snowboarding games go. Though must admit some fondness for Cool Boarders and a selection of other lower quality games that few will admit to enjoying.
Decomp tools for N64 have had some breakthroughs even before AI. Now I imagine it's even better. If that facilitates folks geeking out with their favorite guilty pleasure then so be it!
I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).
They do it because they love the game and want to preserve it, and because they can. You don’t need another reason.
Why do we store books in libraries, or write history textbooks? It's about preservation (and curiosity too).
It was easily one of the best racing games on the system?
im not going to post with as much confidence as your many other replies ... but this is like one of the rarest nintendo games ... maybe that has something to do with it
Before LLMs made these sorts of Sisyphean coding tasks tractable for normal people, there was IRC and Discord, where people with a special interest in programming and emulation could be egged on by the people who delight in the memes. I guess another POV is, were the special interest people and the meme lords ever really friends? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you aren't really thinking deeply enough about how and why these sorts of things actually get made. A sense of "community" no doubt.
I've done a similar project before (taking an NES game I like, disassembling it, and doing a PC port). For me, the attraction is being able to make an ideal version of a game I like, with bugfixes, quality of life improvements, added polish, and not having to deal with hardware restrictions from old consoles. The amount of effort involved doesn't really make sense unless it's something you deeply care about, which is why most commercial rereleases of old games are emulated instead of this sort of improved native port.