I like to decompile and find out how does the developers make these games.
Is it possible and how should i go about it?
And also is it ok to take images from these games
Thanks
A:
this is likely offtopic but here's an answer anyway.
all images are likely to be copyrighted so you can't 'take' them from the games.
decompiling the games themselves will likely require machine-code level knowledge of the system itself. a good place to start reading about this would be an emulator for the system you're looking at.
oedo
2010-05-24 16:25:11
A:
If the games are copyrighted it's illegal to reverse-engineer them (in most cases.)
Nick Gotch
2010-05-24 16:30:01
are you sure about that? i was under the impression that reverse engineering was legal as a form of legitimate discovery? http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID195 is the first thing google turned up and i am NOT A LAWYER, THANK GOD
oedo
2010-05-24 16:33:11
Copyright outlaws making extra copies and distributing them. Under fair use, as long as you retain the original, you should be OK to make a copy. Reverse engineering is not actually covered by copyright, but would likely be a derived work, and therefor fall under the provisions of fair use. If you are using it yourself, from games that you own originals of, I find it very unlikely that you will run into any legal issues.
Grant Johnson
2010-05-24 16:47:55
These games likely predate the DMCA.
dash-tom-bang
2010-05-24 18:18:18
I'm not sure that predating the DMCA makes a difference if the act of reverse-engineering occurs after it's in place. Regardless, there look to be a LOT of legal issues to reverse engineering http://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
Nick Gotch
2010-05-25 16:35:49
+1
A:
I imagine games back then were often written in assembly language. What you're looking for is a disassembler for Motorola 68k (Genesis/Mega Drive) or 65c816 (SNES).
In order to make any sense of the disassembly, you should join a community of other old school enthusiasts and check out the documentation available.
Martin
2010-05-24 16:52:10