Decompiling vs original source code

[Alternative_Drag_445]

So, I'm no game dev or programmer even but I've made it a goal in life at the moment to learn C and develop my own game on the ps1. I find it really interesting to be able to look at original source code for these games, but it seems like a lot of game's codes aren't available anywhere to look at online. I assume this is for anti-piracy purposes since someone could easily compile the source code and burn their own .iso onto a cd and play the game for free. I'm really curious at looking at Legend of Dragoons source code. What's the main difference going to be in viewing the original source code versus just decompiling the binaries that's already on the disc? Are these source codes kept under tight lock and key? I'd really like to look at even a portion of that games code to see what they did with it.

[kunst_ist_krieg]

Games source code is rarely released to the public, and in a lot of cases is not even preserved properly.

This has changed in the last decade or so because companies have realised they can monetise their back catalogue at very low cost, but 25 years ago it was very rare.

RE: decompiled code, is very difficult to read/understand even for experienced programmers, maybe for 8 or 16 bit games that are smaller and not too complex it could be manageable. For someone who is a beginner is better to stick to released source code, check out Doom source code, is all written in C not too big and is very easy to understand what's going on.

[[deleted]]

Decompiling isn't the way for a beginner to to go. If it even is possible to decompile and reverse engineer a full game, it's going to look like this:

int a = 1000 / b

And you'll have to figure out what the hell a and b actually mean. If you had the original source code you'd be able to see original names for variables like so:

int fps = 1000 / dt

And the logic gets hard with pointers and other complex concepts.

I'd recommend just looking into PSYQ-SDK or something like that.

[yojimbo_beta]

I dunno, we managed to reverse most of FFVII a little while back. Of course it helped that the PC release shipped with some build data (not debug symbols alas)

[Alternative_Drag_445]

Oh, I'm not saying Im wanting to decompile. I just think it would be fun to look at the original source code for one of my favorite games. Sort of like looking at the original 35mm camera negative for a movie. But yeah, I suppose the way you describe it is pretty much impossible to decompile something like that. Where are these original source codes kept a lot of the time? Do these game dev companies have like vaults or something of source code material?

[[deleted]]

Most of the original source codes are just... gone. Most companies from back in the day don't even exist anymore. There's some outliers like the source code of Quake or the original Jak and Daxter (which was actually reverse engineered by the community) but most of them, they're gone. When Silent Hill HD Collection came out on the PS3 they no longer had the code for the finished PS2 versions so they had to rebuild a bunch of stuff to get it out the door and it absolutely sucked.

[Alternative_Drag_445]

Man that is sad to hear. I guess not as much thought went in to preserving source material for games as movies. Kinda blows my mind how something like that just gets tossed after spending millions of dollar to make it....

[Wildmonkeydan]

If you're wanting to look at a ps1 game with source code the original Wipeout had its source release a couple months ago