this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Video Game Preservation Through Decompilation (hackaday.com)
submitted 1 month ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

"Legal" is a very strong word here.

A better statement would be that there hasn't really been a major court case regarding decompiling source for hobby use and most cases where it is used for profit or piracy are no nos for existing reasons. But for education purposes or to develop and interface, it is a grey area. In large part because said education makes you toxic as hell in industry and said interfaces are usually for things that violate the license agreement and TOS because the software didn't provide an interface for a reason.

And then you run into cases where the act of bypassing protections to get the binaries in the first place put you in further hot water. Sort of like how the (way over simplified) argument that you are legally allowed to have a backup of your video games but the act of making said backup gets REALLY sketchy in a lot of cases.

I would probably phrase it more as "decompiling source code is not illegal. How you use it might be"

Its also always worth remembering that law comes from precedent. And it is rarely in anyone's interest for stuff like this to go to trial. So there will be a few landmark cases that cover VERY specific use cases and a LOT of cases of big lawyers saying "Do you really wanna fuck with us?" and getting a C&D and a settlement.