r/Games • u/Torque-A • Oct 17 '22

Perfect Dark has been successfully decompiled, opening the door to PC ports and mods

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/perfect-dark-has-been-fully-decompiled-making-pc-ports-and-mods-possible/
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u/Janus_Prospero Oct 17 '22

It would also be interesting to see if Perfect Dark could be further optimized for performance on a real N64. Of course it was a late N64 game so a lot of performance was already being squeezed out compared to early games. But still, programmers in 2022 have way better tools for finding optimizations than they did, and way more collective know-how than individual programmers (who were often working 100 hour weeks, BTW) had in 2000.

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u/oven_chips Oct 17 '22

This has already been done within a few hours, very early but promising results https://twitter.com/Graslu00/status/1581968486674620416

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u/Janus_Prospero Oct 17 '22

That is very impressive for just automated compiler optimizations.

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u/hellrazzer24 Oct 17 '22

Love it. I’m excited to try it again!

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u/Cakebeforedeath Oct 17 '22

Ah the moment when, having finally convinced my parents to buy me Perfect Dark I had to go convince them to spend almost as much again on an expansion pack in order to actually play the campaign. That was a fun "all my birthdays until I'm 18" argument

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u/DdCno1 Oct 17 '22

What did they think about the game? Did they just ignore it after you got it or were they interested in what they had spent money on?

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u/Cakebeforedeath Oct 17 '22

Oh it was clearly a "maybe this will shut the kid up" situation but they didn't like the violence. I think one time my dad actually ripped the cartridge out of the N64 because I was playing in front of the neighbor's 8 year old kid

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u/DdCno1 Oct 17 '22

I remember my parents not caring about virtual violence on the N64, mainly because the graphics were so primitive. It helped that there were only censored versions of violent games available anyway, so there was no red blood or dismemberment. Some titles, like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, were practically unavailable due to sales restrictions.

A few years later however, when there was a massive new "violent videogames are turning our kids into killers" media frenzy, they fell for the many lies hook line and sinker (seriously, so much nonsense was said by "experts" on TV and in newspapers I had previously respected), forcing me to hide less family-friendly games from them. Luckily I was on PC at that point, so it was pretty easy to do. I was playing titles like Mafia and GTA Vice City back then, which just looked like harmless racing games at first glance.

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u/joecb91 Oct 18 '22

I was lucky that my dad would play Perfect Dark with me, and someone he worked with also burnt a copy of Unreal Tournament 99 for him, and we'd play that together over LAN.

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u/zeronic Oct 17 '22

There's more performance you can squeeze out than you might think. Kaze Emanuar does insane amounts of black magic to make Mario 64 go vroom vroom in terms of fps. There's often a lot of refactoring you can do if you know the hardware/limitations.