The software developer ran-j, also known as Ranieri, has been making rapid progress on their new project to recompile Playstation 2 games. The project, which not so recently ago may have seemed fanciful, has taken on exciting connotations for retro gaming hobbyists due to the recent spate of other high-quality recompilations. Last year saw significant progress with recompilations of Nintendo 64 games, thanks to a similar tool from Wiseguy. A recent history of decompilations and recompilations can be read here.
To give an abbreviated version of that story, to play console games on PC computers, players generally need to rely on emulation software, which mimics the specifications of the original gaming hardware, always with some level of technical imperfection. A decompilation, by contrast, breaks down the source code of these games, and rewrites them into a PC programming language, allowing them to run natively on PC hardware. The process is quite tedious, and magnifies in complexity the more code a game has. Ranieri’s Playstation 2 recompiler could greatly streamline this process, much as the N64Recomp project has resulted in a boom of unofficial PC ports for classic Nintendo 64 games.
One such example is the Banjo Kazooie recompilation that was released four days ago. The Banjo Kazooie recompilation isn’t just a straight port of the original Nintendo 64 game. It also includes various modern improvements, which are much easier to add into the code when it is decompiled. With Playstation 2 games hailing from the DVD era, the possibility of easy hacking of these files is another remarkable possibility. The boom has been prompted by Vulkan, due to its specialized rendering technology being well-suited to non-x86 consoles, and Ghidra, which can reverse-engineer source code from compiled code, greatly simplifying the decompilation and recompilation process.
The legal issues involved with such recompilations are as-yet unexplored. Unlike ROM file patches, this level of source code modification likely falls afoul of intellectual property laws. Still, despite recompilations dating back to 2022, there are yet no legal challenges to their existence.
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