Lately there’s been a lot of stir about “decomps” and “recomps”, projects that take retro games and convert their machine code into higher level languages and then get ported to other platforms. There’s been a lot of projects like these for Nintendo 64 gams, bringing titles like Mario 64 and Zelda 64 to PC. It’s really, really exciting for someone like me who wants to take old neglected games and bring them into different platforms.
Modern Vintage Gamer posted an explainer on decomps and recomps on YouTube.
A lot of projects are posted with their progress on decomp.dev.
One of my personal favorite projects is the decompilation of Virtua Racing on the 32X by Matias Zanolli. I hope he does Virtua Fighter next! 🙂
I wanted to try my hand at one of these but didn’t know where to start. Then I saw a video from Video Game Esoterica about the PS2Recomp project. I’ve always wanted to see Atlus’ whimsical Sky Gunner get ported and improved so I thought I’d take a look at PS2Recomp and try it out with the game.
Even with PS2Recomp as a starting point I still had no idea what to do. Luckily there’s Plastered Crab’s YouTube video, PS2Recomp – How to get started recompiling.
I followed the multi-step instructions and while it took a wee bit of additional finagling, I managed to get something running, which is a lot farther than what I usually get when I try something completely new.
After that I didn’t get very far. I’m not at all familiar with PS2 development so I can’t tell how things are supposed to work. I could trace and debug the code and see it was doing stuff but I didn’t have any idea if it was correct or not.
I asked the peeps on the PS2 Recomp Discord and Ran-J was gracious enough to answer my noob questions. But after a while I figured it wasn’t a very effective debug cycle as I couldn’t do much on my own due to my lack of PS2 knowledge.
So I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ll always keep an eye on the PS2 Recomp project. One day, SkyGunner, you’ll get ported.