sm64

I agree with your concern, but I'm quite happy to see what's going on in the retro emulation & decompilation/reverse-engineering scenes[1]. A lot of that is being done and is driven by "the kids". It's an appealing, easy, and low-risk entry point for newer developers who want to dive into low level stuff, and it even has a bit of a "fuck the man" bent to it, which is fantastic. You're right that the environment is different from what we grew up with, it was always going to be. But I think the kids will find their own way. [1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.

Fascinating work. I know that people did the same for Super Mario 64 [1]. It is still unbelievable to me that they can generate a bit-by-bit identical copy of the original ROM by simply running some old gcc on actual C source code files. IIRC the main insight was that Nintendo did not use any optimization flags which made it possible to create a 100% matching binary. I've never really looked into it, but I guess the did some try and error to figure out the exact gcc version that Nintendo used to make sure that they get 100% identical binary code? [1] https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

To be clear, this is not emulation: this is likely a WebGL compiliation of the decompiled port, hence widescreen: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64