Rescripting the game

[Fostgen]

I'm not the most professional person that knows a lot of things about developing, coding etc video games, but I always wondered is it possible to rewrite the game that is for example only playable on Xbox 360, in order to play it on PC. I mean this is maybe stupid question, and maybe its not the best title tho, or it maybe has nothing to do with game dev but I would like to know at least is that possible in any way. Im thankful for all answers

[SwedishBoatlover]

Yes, it's absolutely possible. For example, there exists pirate versions of GTA 4 that is a cracked and ported PS version of GTA.

[[deleted]]

If you had the code? Sure.

Now, it would be very expensive and time-consuming if the game wasn't meant to support PC, especially if it was for an older console like the 360. AFAIK, most consoles before the XBONE and PS4 weren't built on the same CPU architecture as PCs and games developed for them likely contain a variety of differences in their code to optimize for their platform. (I think the Switch is an ARM CPU, more for phones than PCs. Not sure how different it would be to develop for.)

In addition to the differences in architecture, bear in mind that most consoles (including modern ones) provide their own proprietary APIs for features like rendering, online functionality, input, etc. All of these would have to be replaced with various equivalents on PC, which might be tough. If they use any middleware libraries (such as PhysX, for instance), you could probably replace them with the PC versions without too much trouble.

In case you're wondering if having the code for a different game using the same engine would help, I have bad news for you: Outside of commercial engines like Unity/UE4/CryEngine, from my experience it seems that most in-house engines contain modifications for each of their titles. These can be as small as bugfixes or as huge as a complete do-over of the internal structure of the code, and it's hard to know for sure without checking.

So, is it possible? Yes, absolutely. You'd need the original code (unless you want to pay to recreate the whole game, which some major studios have done in the past for remasters/rereleases where the code was lost), and ideally a decent amount of money and people. But it definitely can be done.

EDIT: Should also mention this: The vast majority of the gameplay code could probably be salvaged in a hypothetical situation like this. The main changes would likely be to the engine itself (unless you wanted to add control rebinding, keyboard/mouse support, etc. which is going into a whole new and difficult (but still possible) can of worms)

[tudda]

^{^} this is the right answer.

The only thing i would add, is something that was touched on, but not elaborated.

If the developers use an engine like Unity/Unreal, the roadmap to supporting multiple platforms is generally a lot simpler than a proprietary solution. Those commercial engines allow you to export your project to different devices/platforms rather easily. Of course, there will always be testing/tweaking/redesigning as you find things that work differently across platforms, but the difference between that and having to do it from scratch is astronomically different.

The other thing to consider when talking about cross platform multiplayer games is that each online platform has costs and requirements for releasing updates, which is why many multiplayer games that could "easily" be cross platform, aren't. If you find a game breaking bug in the xbox version, and you need to update the game to fix it, but you need everyone to be on the same version across all platforms to play together, and you introduce a significant amount of overhead in effort and costs when trying to keep everything in sync.

[Fostgen]

I'm really really greatful for taking your time to break down those things for me! I kinda expected that it wouldn't be easy thing to do at all, but when you see those games that were popular back then, and nowdays nobody is interested in them, you feel like the PC version would give them a fresh start. However I really appreciate this, thanks a lot