alt Hacker NewsNoob question. I really hope this doesn't come across as negativity.
I love that people spend time on making old games work, but why do people decompile games that can be emulated by DOSbox or the like? Surely a game this old runs absolutely fine on even very low end hardware?
Replies
I had a few reasons, when I tried tackling RE of a DOS-era game a number of years ago. I wanted to document the file formats, look through the data and find unused media, identify and fix some of the more egregious bugs in the game, build modding tools for it, understand the techniques used to build something that was memorable from my childhood, reduce the friction of running it on a modern system, make available optional improvements like higher resolution, texture replacement, and so on.
It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.
A lot of floppy-based games have on-disk copy protection patterns that take advantage of undocumented behavior of disk drives at the time. So much so that tools like Greaseweazle [0] are necessary to compose full magnetic flux maps of archived floppies.
Another thing is that these games are often made to run on a wide variety of graphics and sound hardware, and effectively have drivers compiled into them.
It's not about running the game, it's about having it open for modification. Patching a game in binary form is ridiculously hard, anything than simple bugfixes is mostly a no-go. With the source code available we can add entire features, port it to Windows 10, implement 4K HDR, textures, new models, new missions... the sky's the limit. Additionally, it's really hard to analyze the game from assembly opcodes with hardcoded data offsets. With C code either we can read what it does directly, or add instrumentation or debugging code to it to figure it out.