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source code for ps2 games

Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:47 am
by uberotix
is there any way to retrieve any of the source code from video games, rather than the open source that is made available by makers of the games

Re: source code for ps2 games

Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 11:05 am
by J.F.
uberotix wrote:is there any way to retrieve any of the source code from video games, rather than the open source that is made available by makers of the games
Other than industrial espionage? No. Reverse engineering programs does NOT give you the source - it gives you the low level machine instructions which you then have to use intelligence and guesswork to figure out what they're doing. This generally takes years for anything substantial. Look at WINE or ReactOS for an example of how long it takes, even when SOME of the information is known.

Sometimes you are lucky and a company forgets to turn off the debug info in a program/library. That gives you more info which helps you figure out what the code is doing. This is fairly rare as companies know that leaving anything in the app that might help others means potentially less profit for them.