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Majora's Mask decompilation project reaches 100% completion

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21–25 of 25 posts

Re: Majora's Mask decompilation project reaches 100% completion

#21

Decompilations and recompilations have been really interesting lately. They seem largely driven by fans interested in replaying old content in ways the original sources haven't provided. E.g. rather than "run normal N64 Mario and Zelda on your switch" you can run them at 4k120 FPS widescreen with all sorts of QoL improvements, modifications, or new gameplay modes. Even extremely classic titles like Super Mario Bros.…

Is recompilation the right word for this? Reprogramming? I am not even into video games, and I am still so impressed by the efforts I have seen. I saw a ray-traced version of Mario 64 that looks incredible. There are also some retranslation groups who also get an A+, for far more literate translations with the sex and world mythology than the original translations that were softened for the American audience. I believe that one group was called DeJap Translations and they were obviously well-educated.

Re: Majora's Mask decompilation project reaches 100% completion

#22
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean room is a legal defense that argues “I implemented similar functionality without consulting the copyrighted work” and sometimes with the addition of “or ever having viewed the original copyrighted work”. For video games the binary is the covered work, not its disassembly. And disassembly is covered by the DMCA and explicitly allowed for this type of purpose, so that’s not illegal at least. I can see the argumen…

> For video games the binary is the covered work, not its disassembly. For the law it doesn't matter much if you look at binary code in a hex editor or at disassembly, since disassembly is just a 1:1 translation of the binary code. Otherwise it would be sufficient to let's say gzip compress the binary and distribute that without fearing any copyright claims since the result would be different and no longer covered, w…

I understand the dmca protects reversing for the purposes of interoperability. My argument is not that the dmca is a foundation for clean room arguments. I just mentioned it because it protects the disassembly of binary code. It’s about clean rooms.

If it’s okay to implement software that does the same thing as some other proprietary software as long as you do it in a clean room, then it’s okay to implement software that does the same thing as other game software as long as you do it in a clean room.

So the argument is really about how clean the room is. Can the person verifying the output of the clean room, who is outside the clean room, also look at the binary? Can they look at the disassembly? These are legal questions. It would be interesting to understand more about these team’s setup, for sure.

Re: Majora's Mask decompilation project reaches 100% completion

#23

Decompilations and recompilations have been really interesting lately. They seem largely driven by fans interested in replaying old content in ways the original sources haven't provided. E.g. rather than "run normal N64 Mario and Zelda on your switch" you can run them at 4k120 FPS widescreen with all sorts of QoL improvements, modifications, or new gameplay modes. Even extremely classic titles like Super Mario Bros.…

Is recompilation the right word for this? Reprogramming? I am not even into video games, and I am still so impressed by the efforts I have seen. I saw a ray-traced version of Mario 64 that looks incredible. There are also some retranslation groups who also get an A+, for far more literate translations with the sex and world mythology than the original translations that were softened for the American audience. I belie…

Recompilations are a separate methodology/category from the decompilations e.g. on the N64 there is this parent project https://github.com/N64Recomp/N64Recomp

Re: Majora's Mask decompilation project reaches 100% completion

#24

Decompilations and recompilations have been really interesting lately. They seem largely driven by fans interested in replaying old content in ways the original sources haven't provided. E.g. rather than "run normal N64 Mario and Zelda on your switch" you can run them at 4k120 FPS widescreen with all sorts of QoL improvements, modifications, or new gameplay modes. Even extremely classic titles like Super Mario Bros.…

it is AWE-MAZING playing things like Ocarina of Time in 4K with upgraded textures blah blah blah blah. and that it comes from the likes of these efforts instead of Nintendo just selling us the damn thing is all the more awe-inspiring from me.

I've been waiting and waiting for Majora's Mask to catch up. I got the recompilation and all, but no textures and other bells and whistles YET.

Glad their Switch legislation hasn't killed this yet.

Re: Majora's Mask decompilation project reaches 100% completion

#25
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen projects like these use the term "clean room" extremely liberally. Possibly just to throw up a shield ("it's clean room so you can't take it down!"). I think the same was even claimed for the re3 (GTA III decompilation) project, which has been since taken down.

This re3? https://github.com/halpz/re3

That's someone who re-posted their own fork – the original repo https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3> was taken down in a DMCA action. The only commits they've added are to change the README links to point to their repository.
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