One of the most interesting things in imitation and secret shows in recent years is the growing trend of playing old video games completely changing their code.
We’ve seen fans do it for everything from Mario 64 to Ocarina of Time to Grand Theft Auto, all with varying degrees of illegality. The reasons for doing this are many; there are challenges of reverse engineering itself, of course, but also the benefits it brings, mainly in the form of the ability to create a good PC version of a classic console game, instead of relying on imitation.
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What’s the difference? As we explained earlier, emulation relies on your computer pretending to be an old console to play games that are installed on that console. Flexible ports for PC (or other platforms!) can be built from scratch, allowing seamless integration of things like screen support and even (in the case of polygonal games) graphics tweaks like ReShade. The last game has received this treatment is the ancient story: The previous one, Super Nintendo, then the game boy in the Nintendo online.
As Nintendo lives, twenty-two-year-old teams, added on the line of the code, and quickly change screen, shers pixel and other food cards . Perhaps most importantly, a second item slot has been added, allowing users to quickly switch between two items on the fly without having to go to the inventory screen to select them individually.
Here’s an image of the original game (running in an emulator on PC) compared to this new PC “port”:
zelda 3 emulation vs pc port
Take care! Now this is the part of the post where we point out that legally this is still a very gray area. Reverse engineering itself is not illegal, but the use of this company can be, and these projects are a combination of the two. They are not alone either; Developers or backend games like this provide the code below and ask you to get the resources of the ROM yourself. The description of this game, for example, says “You need a ROM to remove game elements (levels, pictures). Then, once that’s done, the ROM is no longer needed.
Nintendo will say it’s not important, the developers will say it’s a different matter, and until we start getting some final judgments on disputes like this, I’ll continue to write this at the end of each article in this article!