this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Might need to give it a bit longer than that. There isn't a PC port.
Doesn’t decompiling games make it easy to port? I’m admittedly not an expert on it
In some ways yes.
Decompiling a game means reverse engineering the game to a point that you have a program written in C that compiles to identical machine code as the commercial release. That makes it easier, but not entirely straightforward, to just compile the game for another architecture, because it might be written for hardware-specific features that might not be present on, say, PC.
A minor example is Mario Kart 64 has these big screens around some tracks that are playing footage of the race. That relies on a hardware quirk peculiar to the N64 and it's been difficult if not impossible to get it working anywhere but real hardware.
A really weird one is Super Mario 64. The retail version of the game was apparently compiled with debug flags on. The game has been decompiled, and then compiling it without the debug flag actually causes the game to run smoother, particularly in Dire Dire Docks which chugs so bad on a retail cartridge that speed runners use camera strategies to keep the submarine out of view for better performance.
Decompilation means that they can deterministically recompile the code and get the original ROM back minus assets. Someone may be able to wedge in shims of emulator code for the subsystems that need it. But at that point you're still emulating realistically and still dealing with bottlenecks. The true power of a native Port would open it up to Modern graphics apis larger faster system bus etc that wasn't available initially. It's going to take a bit more programming work before you see something that really blows the doors off emulation. But it will happen.
It certainly makes it easier but I don't know if I'd say it's easy. There's still work to be done to make it run natively on PC with the kinds of settings you'd expect to see on a PC game.
Having the source code makes it trivial to do whatever you want with the code. Working through an emulator is not fun from a coding perspective.
Absolutely not true. I guarantee there is a lot of code, especially hacky code, written specifically for the N64's hardware. Even if you port it to a modern PC, you're still going to have to address a bunch of unexpected behavior that relied on the quirks of the hardware. Graphics effects in particular are known for this.
Source code means you can refactor it to preserve that graphics. But realistically that's unlikely if nobody wants to put the effort in
Why would you work through the emulator? You modify the source rom.
Rom hacks have existed since the GB era of games, that’s not even using an emulator, played straight on the GB with a hacked cart.
Very simply, the source ROM is code that isn’t readable in that way. The emulator interpolates the ROM binary. While ROM hacking is a thing, it’s done through hijacking the emulator’s/platform’s API calls.
Imagine having an audiobook as an MP3, but you want to rewrite chapter 8. You have all the words, you can hear them, but you don’t have the script. You have to transcribe everything first in order to have the book text. From there, you can edit what the book says, but it’d be easier if you just had the text in the first place.
Uhh, no, you literally modify the source rom, if you have the source code for the console it’s child’s play. Lots are made with dev kits, or their stolen code.
And you don’t use an emulator at all. What you’re suggesting means that game could only be played on a singular emulator with a particular bios setting. You could do that, but why?
I’m comparing ROM hacking to decompilation. Decomp completely renders the full source code as readable and compilable for new binaries. ROM hacking doesn’t go that far.
Decompile is even easier than rom hacking… since you have the rom source code now…. So you can insert files instead of just replacing or the slightly more work of modifying (which you claimed isn’t possible…?)
Why would you ever work through an emulator?
You’re using an audio book, but it’s actually more an album, you can change the tracks on the cd, but you can’t easily change the song in the middle, but just like an audiobook, you can mute or just delete the content, you’re saying you can’t do anything, this is just wrong on every level. Rom hacks ARE still able to do this though. Although most just replace files with others by changing the whole data.
A rom or iso is just a compilation of files that’s read and interpreted by the emulator or console. Why are you thinking it’s a singular file like an audio book? It’s more of a .zip file.
Roms and emulators aren’t that complicated.