• Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    First of all this is a chain of replies to someone who said that this would be the way to maintain games for the future. So that’s the argument that’s being attacked here.

    Secondly with an emulator you can emulate hardware, so recompiling space invaders would cause the issue I mentioned and you wouldn’t be able to fix it because it’s a “bug” in the original code (not really a bug, but rather using hardware limitation as a feature), and my point is that you don’t know what sort of similar issues you might find here, therefore this is the worst format for preserving old media, ROMs and emulators are better for preserving (which again is the discussion here)

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      While I agree that ROM + emulator is best for preservation, you absolutely can fix the space invader bug because you have the C code which would let you add in delays. Just like there are many versions of Space Invaders for different consoles an none of them use emulation but play like the original. I’m a fan of si78c, a memory accurate reimplementation of the 1978 arcade game written in C.

      Of course Space Invaders wasn’t written in C so this new tool doesn’t apply.

      But the article does talk about how the decompiler sometimes introduces bugs and how they were manually fixed before compiling.

      So you were right but the problem you brought up has already been addressed. (And will continue to need to be addressed as more cross compiling bugs are found in each game.)

      I interpreted the word “legacy” the OP used as the fandom for old games rather than perfect preservation.