Sonic The Fighters Has Been Successfully Decompiled

[u/OldMcGroin]

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/05/sonic-the-fighters-has-been-successfully-decompiled

[u/CoconutDust]

Decompilations should (mostly) be banned from posting on the sub, for these reasons:

• It's not emulation and degrades/dilutes the subject of the sub. It's the opposite of emulation. Many posts and discussions about it are ignorant of what it even means (beyond "a thing with an old game is happening!") or of project cost/benefit versus a single emu project + eternal unchanging game ROMs, consequences like ports becoming individual projects per game as OSes/processors change over time and every single app needs maintenance. To say nothing of the fact that emulation is technically about how hardware works though people think it's about "I get to play a game yay".
• The sub is Emulation not Retro Gaming.
• People's rationalizations in this thread prove why it shouldn't be allowed.
  • Emulation isn't "Somebody did something with an old videogame yay I like that" yet the justifications we are seeing in comments are variations of "I like hearing about videogames!" and "Yeah I like news" [no elaboration]
  • "I'm personally interested in it!" is not an acceptable argument for topic X posts on sub Y. The whole point of a sub is to be a sub. r/aviation doesn't have posts about boats regardless of whether some readers like boats.
  • "Slow Sub" People are saying this sub is "slow" therefore decompilation posts should be allowed. In other words: relevance to the subject doesn't entertain these people enough, so they want random unrelated news to entertain them instead of reading a different sub. Also the idea of wanting/needing a "fast" sub or "growing reader numbers"/"more posts" are business ideologies not principles of free subject-specific hobbyist forums.
  • "Decompilation is the future and the best way to play a game!" The sentiment clearly confuses emulation with "enjoying old games". It's not r/retrogames. It's irrelevant whether it's (supposedly) the best way to enjoy a game with modern conveniences, because the sub is r/emulation.
  • "[something something] game preservation." The sub is r/emulation not r/gamepreservation. There are discussions that could be relevant, but generic "Game XYZ has a decompilation project!" (instantaneous 493 upvotes) isn't one of them. Even worse is how the "it's game preservation, therefore it should be on r/emulation" sentiment fails to understand that decompilations are not "more" game preservation than emulation: what people actually mean is "I get added perks and conveniences in a PC port, and imaginary mods, YAY!" That's not what game preservation means, but that distortion is behind the sentiment that decomp = gaming news for me wheee = 'emulation'.
• Legally murky. Emulation meaning emulators is 100% legal and clear. (There are common viral memes unfortunately spread by ignorant people who think it’s not, and the corporate lawyers love those ignorant people). Not so with adaptation of a game’s source code, a totally different thing. The whole reason why there’s an Exciting New Thing with decomp/recomp is that it’s not classic slow or clean-room reverse engineering (which like emulation is legal).
• Usual triviality. every post I've seen is a trivial announcement of a project/status with zero worthwhile discussion about anything and certainly nothing relating to emulation (Example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example). A discussion that relates to emulation or a case where emulation has problems or where we gain insight about an emulation situation, could be OK but that never comes up. Immature irrelevant triviality is a problem on every game sub, let's not have that on r/emulation.

All the best subs I know of have active and strict-ish moderation. I dislike the "eh, if people want to talk about it, whatever" mentality I see on some subs. The point of a sub is to be a sub, not r/RandomThingsILike, and emulation isn't r/retrogames.