More infringing than emulators. De/recompilation projects are pretty clearly 'derivative works' of the original copyrighted program code, even if they require the original ROM in order to extract other assets necessary to compile a fully playable artifact.
The closer analogy would be fan-translation patches, which are also pretty clearly copyright-infringing derivative works though generally tolerated by rights holders.
Companies often encourage (or at least turn a blind eye to) creative derivative works from fan communities, especially if they're non-commercial and aren't cutting into the market share of their own official products enough for them to take notice.
This is a recomp project, not a decomp project; the original binary is supplied by the user, mechanically translated into source code at an architecture level (rather than a human-readable level), and patched. It’s AOT dynamic recompilation and the original IP isn’t distributed.
I do agree that decompilation projects are obviously not transformative (the only fair use feet they really have to stand on are purpose and market effect), but recomp projects are a little more interesting and might live on much less shaky footing.
I see that now… why did they check it in? One of the whole points of this approach is that that assembler should be trivial to re-derive by the end user since it’s just the original program listing. Some of the Xbox 360 recomp projects like <a href="https://github.com/mchughalex/skate3recomp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mchughalex/skate3recomp offer a better example of how this pattern can be achieved without distributing the binary at any intermediate level.
happa · · focus · HN ↗
wgjordan · · focus · HN ↗
The closer analogy would be fan-translation patches, which are also pretty clearly copyright-infringing derivative works though generally tolerated by rights holders.
Companies often encourage (or at least turn a blind eye to) creative derivative works from fan communities, especially if they're non-commercial and aren't cutting into the market share of their own official products enough for them to take notice.
bri3d · · focus · HN ↗
I do agree that decompilation projects are obviously not transformative (the only fair use feet they really have to stand on are purpose and market effect), but recomp projects are a little more interesting and might live on much less shaky footing.
Sesse__ · · focus · HN ↗
The Git repository contains tens of thousands of lines of assembler code that seem to come from the original.
bri3d · · focus · HN ↗