I'd also encourage people to check out the Legend of Dragoon recomp [1]. It's a real labor of love that has breathed new life into a largely abandoned game. You can play it fully vanilla, or with improved graphics, fixes to cumbersome design choices, bugfixes, etc.
None of the Switch emulators Nintendo took down had such issues, they all required supplying your own keys.
Nintendo takes them down anyway because they can, and because they have enough money that no individual can fight them on it. Their takedowns have no real legal standing, and there's no reason why they couldn't do the same for every other emulator, other than them simply not wanting to.
You become a machine with your workflow, once again limited only by your time/energy, tokens, and your discretion on how to spend it.
Indeed. But I think it's fair to say that just embracing LLMs is not enough.
I was a pretty nerdy kid even then, and I saw graphing calculator as 'portable computer' in 1993! So, of course I wanted one.
When our teachers found about them, they banned the use of graphing calculators, some teachers going so far as to only allowing 'four-bangers' (a basic one) for classes lower than Trig (I never got to Calc in high school).
Funny, but your statement reminded me of what one of math teachers used to say: "If you use a graphing calculator, you aren't doing math." It seems really quaint today.
Not your handwriting, not your work!
This says more about you than anything else. You weren't able to produce good code before AI, and you are not producing good code after AI.
Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam.
Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?
Yes.
Even if you're the owner of the game, the contracts for the voice actors, motion capture, models, etc. frequently define very narrow terms of usage. Defining the exact release platforms is common. Not to mention profit sharing if the actors or studios you're hiring are popular.
It's even worse for retro games. Many times the original rights holder went out of business, sold their rights, died, or something else that muddies the ownership chain.
Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like film or games, the effect on artists or designers can be pretty depressing.
So yes, games are not unique in this way. I am hopeful in the optimistic future case where LLMs lead to lower barriers to entry, UBI, and so forth that copyright essentially disappears, or at the very least is severely reformed.
Many things should simply enter the public domain at a far more accelerated rate.
1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.
2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.
Isn't the current system setup around the idea that the company gets the rights, and in return the workers get a basically risk-free salary? Wouldn’t your proposal undo that, so then workers took on the risk of whether they got paid, based on whether the game ends up being profitable?
Worth a look if you want a bit of nostalgia.
I’m really curious about trying this myself. Recently I’ve been handing off tasks for agents to complete on their own more and more. While their work is acceptable I’ve found them to not only take a long time to complete it, but they often add too much complexity and tests.
Historically there was a notion of "clean room" reimplementation.
These days it seems people translate the actual game code into a different representation of that same code and that makes it open source? Github is full of these.
These projects start off with the original assembly code and use it actively throughout all stages. This is about as far away from clean room as you get.
On the one hand, it is fairly clear that producing source code with the explicit goal of reproducing a 1:1 binary is in no way transformative, so that's out. This would be a really hard argument to even attempt.
On the other hand, these projects are mostly free, intended for owners of the game to play the original game on a different platform or in a modified format, and not likely to have a negative effect on the original work's desirability or value. And, the reproductions aren't complete and alone usually produce limited to no value to a consumer (usually, they won't start without the original game files). These are the other important factors considered in fair use determinations and generally go the way of these being OK.
So, it's hard to say. With reverse engineering and copyright in the US in general, context is crucially important; something that would be completely illegal for one purpose (ie - decompiling and recompiling a competitor's software to distribute it without a license or use it internally without purchasing it would be obviously illegal) could be OK for another one.
Absolutely false. There are an infinite number of programs that will compile to the same machine code. Especially when an optimizer is involved. Discovering one of those is a creative process, transformative, and protected.
Using an LLM to do it for you? I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole. Seems to close to mechanical transformation to me.
Then a freshly written project would be completely different with no derivative elements at all; the only commonality between the two codebases is their functional elements. You can compile a decomp into the same binary, but that's only to prove functional equivalence. The intended mode would be with a modern compiler that completely rewrites the logic (it might even have to if it writes it for a completely different computer architecture, which describes every retro console game). Then neither the source nor the compiled artifact would match.
I strongly disagree with this notion from even a conceptual (much less legal) level; the point of compilation is not to erase the algorithms the programmer implemented, just to optimize and implement them.
> You can compile a decomp into the same binary, but that's only to prove functional equivalence.
This is like saying that a translated book is only "functionally" identical to the original; there's a lot of precedent in copyright law for this not being the case, and I don't think any argument revolving around the transformativeness of the compilation process would fly at all.
Copyright for this new code is owned by the person doing decompilation. No one knows how similar to the original it is or not, just that it compiles to the same output.
is there really no tools whatsoever that produce proof certificates for "these two functions do the same thing"?
This is also partly a preservation activity so (as best we can create it) identical code generating identical output is a big part of the point.
But in essence it's not so complex. You only need the original compiler that was used to compile the game and tools like ghidra. Binutils for the architecture can help. From there you ask the agent to start building the project. Prepare to spend a ton of tokens though if you go the full AI route.
Relatedly, https://github.com/perfect-dark-pc-port/perfect_dark forked from the above describes itself as “a work-in-progress port of the Perfect Dark decompilation to modern platforms”. Further: “The game is in a mostly functional state, with both singleplayer and split-screen multiplayer modes fully working. There are minor graphics- and gameplay-related issues, and possibly occasional crashes.”
I'm wondering if you might have success with your project using the same techniques. Reach out - I'd love to collaborate.
In my mind using an LLM to assist with decompiling is fine, as the output is provably correct. It either compiles to the original binary or it doesn’t.
Turning that into a playable PC game with controls that feel good, etc, is a different story. That requires human taste & judgement.
Which does kind of suck. Yeah, it's not nearly as cool to say "I prompted a probabilistic pile of tensors and it did the hard work for me", and I think it majorly adjusts how "impressive" projects are. There's no point pretending like decompiling a game by hand and using GPT-6.7 to do it are remotely comparable.
The suck-y part is that if you do the decomp with GPT-6.7 and produce, say, a PC port of an early 2000s console game, a large number of people will refuse to touch it and treat it as if you have committed a cardinal sin. Maybe that's justified? I dunno. It definitely goes beyond people just saying it isn't as fun.
Meanwhile so many westerners see LLMs as "stealing IP", it becomes a bit paradoxical where the lines get drawn.
i think you agree that there is. but it should change your language about this idea of "consumers" and "benefits" - like this is the difference between making code and making a product. nobody NEEDS retro games. in my opinion, they aren't even that good! they are completely and utterly an aesthetic experience. the process IS the product.
Not to mention, there's a lot of stuff beyond an "aesthetic experience". Videogames have historical value, and they have relevancy at the very least as a testament of the state of the industry at any given point.
Legend of Dragoon, for example, integrated QTE-like controls in its attacks, even as a turn-based game. FFVIII, released the same year, implemented interaction in a somewhat similar way. These two are very early predecessors to mechanics Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 much more recently used. That has value.
If anyone wants to establish random conditions as to why they consider a work to be worthy or not, they may have those. But then they should keep them to themselves, rather than pretending people shouldn't care about something because of the way it was done. It's like the classic situation of someone complaining about how some open source project doesn't do something exactly in the way they like. I have nothing but contempt and despise for that sort of people, and it's a whole order of magnitude worse here, where the "problem" stems from their political stance, which nobody with a pulse should give a crap about.
[right hand emoji] "their political stance"... "they should keep them to themselves"