this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
203 points (97.7% liked)
RetroGaming
23915 readers
83 users here now
Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
- Be kind.
- No spam or soliciting for money.
- No racism or other bigotry allowed.
- Obviously nothing illegal.
If you see these please report them.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It looks like the project is really careful not to include copyrighted materials in their distribution.
Clever. I hope this protects the makers.
Like the Mario 64 Unreal Engine remake?
Edit: Unreal Engine, not Unity. My mistake. My point is that unless the project uses absolutely zero intellectual property, such as characters, stories, or franchise names, Nintendo will almost undoubtedly take ruthless interest.
I did a quick Google search, but I’m not familiar with this project and it’s not obvious to me what this project is.
They probably mean the Super Mario 64 Decompilation Project.
The goal was to turn the finished ROM back into unable code, that would do 1:1 the same thing. They finished a couple of years back.
https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64
Yes, they did a really good job. It handles the logic, but keep in mind the ROM itself is going to have operations that talk to the hardware that does things that just don’t exist in the code. The function will actually be in the hardware. Those pieces still have to be supplied of course.
My mistake, I misremembered. It was in Unreal Engine, and IIRC it was right before they released the shitty 3D All Stars port.
Source code automatically generated from copyrighted binary code is a derivative of copyrighted code, though. It's like taking a copyrighted book and running it through Google Translate and then clean up the sentences manually. You could be lucky that a publisher might not care about a translation into Icelandic but if you were to auto-translate a French version of a book into English and try to distribute it in the US, you'd probably get in trouble even if you leave out all graphic artwork.