Comment on Sony is losing exclusives as their games get ported to PC with AI
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 14 hours agoEmulation is nice if you go for an authentic experience. This is better: It allows a lot more easier modding, especially for older titles which then get widescreen support and improved graphics.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
What I’m hearing through the grapevine is that these quick and dirty executables are not conducive to any of those benefits, because it’s hardly different from just emulating it in the first place.
xan1242@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
That I can confirm firsthand. Recompiled code is just prebaked CPU instructions in another language that can be compiled. That’s all there is to it.
So for modding, it’s only slightly easier technically as you have the option to inject code easier than on the emulated platform and providing facilities for the host OS to load them (dynamic libraries, which is a big benefit which most of the slop coders don’t fully understand how or why it is).
For proper modding research, a decompilation (of the portions of the game you want to mod very extensively) is needed.
For a simple aspect ratio and UI fix patch (and other simple improvements) - that is achievable on the original code itself via cheats/code injection (anything that has an FPU should work, PS1 and older are harder generally). You generally do not need a whole recompilation/decompilation for this kind of a thing.
Sometimes even the original hardware without any performance boost can handle it, but most of the times this is where emulator’s overclocking and memory extension features come into play to help.
Honestly, in my opinion, machine code hacking is not that hard. It takes way less time and energy to do it than this to achieve the same “improvements” with way lower barriers to entry.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 13 hours ago
But emulating does not give you Ultrawide(in beta) or 4K @ 240FPS, FSR (currently still disabled in source, coming soon), Discord Rich Presence and Background Shader Compilation.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
What I’ve seen are posts like these floating around. I haven’t done much emulation lately, but aspect ratio and frame rate adjustments don’t sound new to me, nor do background shader compilations. It also sounds like the functionality can often be unreliable and difficult for a human to get in there and fix, unlike a “proper” decompilation that we’ve seen so much of out of the N64 scene.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 13 hours ago
Ultrawide is a different thing - you have to adjust camera parameters to make it work good. Frame Rate adjustments also depend on the Game Engine - there are probably still a lot of games out there that link physics with frame rate (especially on consoles), so just ramping up FPS will break your game. This can be avoided if you have code you can actually modify.
I am sure that manual de/recompilations are easier to modify, but it’s also more work - not a bit more work, but years of work in many cases.
spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app 13 hours ago
It’s hardly different from an end user perspective (except emulators often have extra features the direct games don’t), but it is a very different way to get things running.