ido VS sm64

hahah yes the "0.0f" is different from "0.f" is different from "0.0" is different from "0" is a great IDO meme as well. One of the changes we had to make we started to support the PAL release, which was compiled at -O2, was to go back and change some constants from explicit "1.0f" to "1" to get the code-gen to match.

I think that that is a C thing, though: an unpostfixed 0. is a double. Sometimes IDO can do the conversion at compile time, and sometimes it can't. But, the compiler will treat things "0.0f" and a compile-time "(f32)0.0" as different constants...

We have a kinda outdated document of weird IDO behavior which is worth a read if you want to trigger some PTSD: https://hackmd.io/vPmcgdaFSlq4R2mfkq4bJg#Compiler-behavior

Also, since SGI/MIPS/IDO was from Stanford (I think...?), there is actually a surprising amount of published papers on IDO's compilation model. Which comes in handy if you are trying for the ultimate joke of decompiling the written-in-pascal compiler into C: https://github.com/n64decomp/ido

The SM64 is still going strong https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

Nintendo won't allow any binaries floating around though.

Romhacks are typically modifying the compiled binary ROM image. Kaze' work is based on the painstakingly disassembled code from the n64decomp project[1]. He's working in C, modifying the game and compiling it again for the original hardware. Not sure I'd call that a "romhack".

Great videos though!

[1] https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

A team or something reverse engineered super mario. I think that's the repo and it's mostly in C

From course_table.h and course_defines.h we can find that: COURSE_MIN == 0 and COURSE_MAX == 25 - so it looks like every secret stage is a full-fledged "course" for the purposes of counting stars, bringing us to 25 courses + castle stars (COURSE_NONE). So, the maximum possible value for starCount should be 7 * 26 = 182.

Multi-year decompilation project: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

The port source code of the decompilation is still up on github and Nintendo hasn't taken it down in years, cause they can't since everything has been done with legal methods

This is false, the source code never leaked; it was meticulously and painstakingly decompiled by hand.

It sounds like, rather than a ground-up rewrite, COBOL should be treated as an object-code language, and "hand-decompiled" (ala efforts like https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64) into an HLL that can, at every point, be losslessly transpiled back into the original COBOL.

I know the tooling for doing that doesn't currently exist... but paying someone to develop it would be cheaper than any one of these ground-up rewrite projects!