alt Hacker NewsI understand the technical appeal of this effort, but wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Fundamentally, decompilation is not solving a technical problem most of the time (because the source already exists somewhere) but a social one (that the owner doesn't want to release it).
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By that logic VPNs and many other technical solutions are also not solving technical problems, since it is theoretically possible to achieve the same results by other means.
> Wouldn't it be easier to try to obtain the original source code? Or has that been lost and all that's left is a blob?
Define easier? There is virtually no incentive for a game studio to release their original source code. Studios are running on already tight enough margins as it is with one lackluster release being enough to doom a company to oblivion.
Unless you have a method to completely reorient capitalism away from the idea of intellectual property then painstakingly reversing the C code from MIPS assembly will always be the easier path.
Remember too, that we are on Hacker News. Only a tiny sliver of the population, in some cases just one or two people, cares about the source code. Not worthwhile for a studio to release the code just to satisfy a couple of nerds. What is the upside? Unknown. Downsides? Numerous.
Almost all instances of source code being released have come from small studios or individuals who are ideologically motivated, and are otherwise independently successful. John Carmack / Id Software comes to mind.
With these old games sometimes the source is just lost. I used to work with a guy who wrote Brian the Lion(the Amiga game) and he always says he wishes he still had the source code for it. We've also looked briefly at the source code of Driver, and the only one in company archives was not the final version. There were 2 revisions after that one but no one has a copy of those. And then we pulled a bunch of old CDs with assets and code burnt back in 1990s and about 50% were unreadable already, god knows what exactly was on them.
I wouldn't be surprised if the original source code is probably lost and forgotten in a ZIP drive stored in a basement somewhere in Tokyo.
I've made a similar point in an earlier comment, but consider the following:
Even if the original sources leaked in a human-readable format, the original game was probably written in a mixture of the device-specific dialect of the Mips R3000 assembly used by the Nintendo 64, whatever in-house assembler macro routines SGI provided for the RSP game-specific microcode, and some C89 glue code in an IDE like Metrowerks Codewarrior 4, by a team of overworked japanese developers in a hurry.
We can safely assume that the final decompiled code is way more readable/usable than the original.