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Porting Games From Binary

Posted by michael on from the meaningless-and-time-consuming-are-our-middle-names dept.

CowboyRobot writes "My favorite Slashdot links are those that inspire me to embark on meaningless and time-consuming quests. This is one of them. Two Canadian game developers at Digital Eclipse have a thorough explanation of how to port a game using nothing but the binary stream coming out of the cartridge. They use the TRS-80 and Phantasy Star III as examples."

2 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. It can be useful sometimes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In our lab we sometimes have to reverse-engineer components for which we no longer have documentation. It would be very simple to export the data of a video game cartridge by accessing its ROM module with a binary card reader. The trickier part is to get the offset right so that any fluctuations will be evened out on the oscilator. One could then re-compile the imported code into a new platform similar to what the folks at MAME do.

    What we've done is imported "Yars' Revenge" from the Atari 2600 did some elevation emulation, ported the code, and re-compiled to make it work on the Intellivision. We may be selling that cartridge commercially as there is a great need for 8-bit cartridges.

    Which is nice.

  2. Project Odin by paugq · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The guys at OS/2 Netlabs have been doing this for years now. It'ts called Project Odin They run Win32 apps on top of OS/2 with no emulation: they "translate" binaries on-the-fly. They even run Win32 drivers on OS/2!!