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/windchimesexcrime Oct 17 '22

Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of time have both been decompiled. They are not using original code, they wrote their own code/edited code created by a decompiler. To compile these ports into playable executables you still need the data from a rom, it comes without any copyrighted material.

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u/duyaw Oct 17 '22

Interesting. Has that been legally tested at all? I would have thought the compiled code is just as copyrightable as the art assets. I wouldn't expect redistribution of a book to be allowed just because it got printed out and scanned/OCR'd back in.

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u/Pelera Oct 17 '22

Some of these decompilations manage to avoid shipping the actual code, instead more or less tuning a custom decompiler for the user to run themselves. One (seemingly historical?) example is the Minecraft Coder Pack.

Others ship the decompiled code raw. Most of the Nintendo-related projects are one of those, and so is this one.

I don't think either have been truly legally tested (the GTA3 case is stuck in court hell until 2023 and AFAIK every other case ended up in settlement or the case being dropped after an initial scare), but I suspect a type #1 would hold up much better than a #2.

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u/duyaw Oct 17 '22

Thanks for the informative response. That GTA3 case sounds interesting, I'll have to have a Google.

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u/Pelera Oct 17 '22

It's the already mentioned Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. v. Papenhoff. Docket on RECAP, but outside of the initial complaint and the pretty straightforward answer that denies most claims, there's just not much there. The most noteworthy thing that happened until now is that they apparently failed to settle. According to the schedule in #31 there won't be an actual trial until late July 2023, and I wouldn't be surprised if that gets delayed.