• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

They lost the source code to what!?

Status
Not open for further replies.

jonabbey

Member
I recall reading somewhere that Origin Systems had lost the sources for Ultima 7 at some point. I'm sure a lot of old microcomputer games met that fate.
 

Cheerilee

Member
Enix lost the source code to Dragon Quest 7 and 4r when Heartbeat closed up shop to go make Pokeman games for Nintendo, preventing Enix from releasing an English version of 4r.
 

Squeak

Member
EmCeeGramr said:
I can see the problem with something like FFIII, because that's an RPG. But Sonic and R-Type? Platformer and scrolling shooter ROM hacks and clones made in Flash are made by the dozens.
But you see, then it's really not the same game any more... Live Arcade I'm looking in your direction.
Finer details and glitches will be different.
 

Lathentar

Looking for Pants
EmCeeGramr said:
That's another thing I was wondering. In the case of many older games (the ones which are most likely to have had their source code lost), wouldn't it be relatively easy and simple with today's technology to just rewrite them using the finished game and other materials as reference?

I can see the problem with something like FFIII, because that's an RPG. But Sonic and R-Type? Platformer and scrolling shooter ROM hacks and clones made in Flash are made by the dozens.
But getting the minor tweaks in these cases are very very difficult. Its like an uncanny valley, it plays really close but since its not perfect you're completely turned off.
 
Squeak said:
But you see, then it's really not the same game any more... Live Arcade I'm looking in your direction.
Finer details and glitches will be different.
Lathentar said:
But getting the minor tweaks in these cases are very very difficult. Its like an uncanny valley, it plays really close but since its not perfect you're completely turned off.

That's where the whip and the sandwich come back into play!
 
ruby_onix said:
Enix lost the source code to Dragon Quest 7 and 4r when Heartbeat closed up shop to go make Pokeman games for Nintendo, preventing Enix from releasing an English version of 4r.

Source? I've never heard the code mentioned in this context. My understanding was that DQIVr US got cancelled just because without Heartbeat there was no staff that could reprogram it.

edit:
From Enix's official statement:
Given the complexity of the PlayStation version of the game, it is virtually impossible for anyone but Heartbeat to integrate the translated text, revise game code and generally localize the game for the North American marketplace.

and from Justin Lucas, a former Enix America employee:

I think from the time we announced the cancellation to the time of the merger the message board was FULL of posts calling us liars. If we wanted to lie, I am sure we could have come up with something much more creative than Heartbeat closing up shop wanting to move on. Ask any programmer of any programming language how interested they are in working on someone else’s code. That will give you an idea of what we went through to find a way for us to bring the title to the US.

The code wasn't lost.
 

soco

Member
EmCeeGramr said:
That's another thing I was wondering. In the case of many older games (the ones which are most likely to have had their source code lost), wouldn't it be relatively easy and simple with today's technology to just rewrite them using the finished game and other materials as reference?

I can see the problem with something like FFIII, because that's an RPG. But Sonic and R-Type? Platformer and scrolling shooter ROM hacks and clones made in Flash are made by the dozens.

the fine details are important, such as the rate of acceleration that Sonic has or how fast it takes him to turn around and things like that. it's easier to just debug for those specific variables, but in doing this you run the risk of missing things from the original.

it really depends upon the complexity of the older systems and such. SMB1 would probably be easy, at least compared to say SMB3. how many people would bitch if you couldn't do the warp tricks in SMB1 to get to the higher levels or just to world -1? recreating those things can be a real pain in the ass.
 

RiZ III

Member
oBa said:
Sega losing source code is an understatement, they in most cases never keep it. At a previous company I worked for, Sega had contracted us to do a pack of their retro titles. When asked for the source code for the titles (approximately 75 genesis and sms titles) Sega responded with "we don't have source code for any of those projects". and even better they suggested we "go out on the internet and download the roms from various rom sites".

Wow :lol
 

M3d10n

Member
I don't think Sega lost the source code for Sonic the Hedgehog, unless it happened after 1998, otherwise how can they explain Sonic Jam for the Sega Saturn?

The game is 100% faithful to the original and even had the Sonic 2 spindash added. I don't think the Saturn is powerful to emulate the Genesis, nor that Sega was willing to develop a full emulator AND hack spin dash into the original ROM.
 

M3wThr33

Banned
Jonnyram said:
And when that hard drive crashes?
Most people, including businesses, didn't know the value of backups until this last decade. A lot of early stuff has been lost forever.

Actually, it's not been mentioned in this thread yet, but Southend said they had to reverse engineer R-Type I and II for the new XBLA game, as Irem don't have the source code anymore.

Shows my youth in this industry. :lol
Of course, I still have files saved from my oldest of old computers from the 80s. I've always been paranoid about data loss.
 

cRIPticon

Member
Lathentar said:
But getting the minor tweaks in these cases are very very difficult.

Exactly right.

Its like an uncanny valley, it plays really close but since its not perfect you're completely turned off.

Well, this is not an "uncanny valley" example, but I get what you mean.
 

ElFly

Member
Segata Sanshiro said:
The 1up interview with the Panzer Dragoon guy has him essentially confirming the Saga code "loss". So that's something source-able.

To be fair, Sega went through really hard times at some points, so I can see them not taking the necessary care with the old backups.
 

ThatObviousUser

ὁ αἴσχιστος παῖς εἶ
Okami was a nightmare from what I understand, not just due to a little lost code, but because all the comments were in Japanese, etc.
 

ElFly

Member
M3d10n said:
I don't think Sega lost the source code for Sonic the Hedgehog, unless it happened after 1998, otherwise how can they explain Sonic Jam for the Sega Saturn?

The game is 100% faithful to the original and even had the Sonic 2 spindash added. I don't think the Saturn is powerful to emulate the Genesis, nor that Sega was willing to develop a full emulator AND hack spin dash into the original ROM.

At that point maybe they still had the source.

Or maybe it was something they could do with good old rom hacking.
 
Rlan said:
Sonic's not such a difficult thing now, considering there is a ridiculous amount of documentation with people completely decompiling the games and re-writing the comments for it.

And stuff like this:

http://stealth.emulationzone.org/Mettrix/index.php#FanDevelopment

which can create this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pkG1ZTu83c

Instead of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPIJoioXxtU&feature=related

Holy wow. Sonic Genesis GBA looks like it's running at 10 FPS, while the fan hack is 100 times better. FU Sonic Team!
 

cRIPticon

Member
ElFly said:
To be fair, Sega went through really hard times at some points, so I can see them not taking the necessary care with the old backups.

No excuse. The fact is that, due to the isolationist attitude of Sega, in the past, archiving and maintenance fell to the individual dev teams. While working on emu stuff for a game service, a friend of mine stated that Sonic Spinball source was lost at Sega. The entirety of it was finally located on a 1.44" floppy disk still inside of the game's sound designer's computer, in a box in his garage. Crazy!
 

koam

Member
[Nintex] said:
There's also the missing credits in Okami on Wii, some say the source material of the credits movie has been lost.

Umm, i haven't played okami yet (it's on my list) but shouldn't that be FMV? Can't they just finish the ps2 version and read the credits and write them down on a paper? Can't they record the ending to the ps2 version, turn it into an fmv, and load it into the wii version?

I should ship Retro an empty hard drive and a note that says "please back up metroid prime's source code on this, and store this in a building far away from the original source code"
 
Ask any programmer of any programming language how interested they are in working on someone else’s code

Truer words have never been spoken. Christ I hate uncommented code. Hate hate hate.

is truer a word? I don't think it is.
 

fausty

Member
I've heard from more than one person that the source code for Persona 1 and 2 was lost, which is why the PSP compilation was impossible to make. Gah!
 

koam

Member
gregor7777 said:
Truer words have never been spoken. Christ I hate uncommented code. Hate hate hate.

is truer a word? I don't think it is.

I took a look at some guy's source code at work today. He created an entirely new project, and had already written 32 functions and a few classes. There was one comment in the entire code and it was "/* Begin */"
 
Tribes 1 source code is supposedly forever MIA

people at tribalwar.com have been trying to hunt it down for years... people tracking down ex-dynamix workers, talking to Sierra employees, etc etc.

:(
 

soco

Member
jvm said:
When I visited Epic about 5 years ago, I was told point-blank that they'd lost the source to the original Unreal.

that shouldn't be so difficult because i seem to recall some version of that leaking, wasn't final though that i remember. i remember watching someone try to get stuff up and running ages ago.
 

Grimmy

Banned
fausty said:
I've heard from more than one person that the source code for Persona 1 and 2 was lost, which is why the PSP compilation was impossible to make. Gah!

Princess Crown too right?
 

bumpkin

Member
gregor7777 said:
Truer words have never been spoken. Christ I hate uncommented code. Hate hate hate.

is truer a word? I don't think it is.
The only thing worse than uncommented code is code that is simply not logical. People who make the code more complex than it has to be -- as if to say "look, I know obscure syntax!" -- make me want to punch them in the neck. There's a handful of older projects at my work that we occasionally have to make updates to, and when those come along, it's a damn nightmare trying to sort it out sometimes. No lie; there was one programmer who used to work at the company that would write his own version of functions that already exist in the language's standard libraries. The irony being that these weren't deep, assembly-level redefinitions. They were quite literally wrappers for the high-level functions... Fucking moron.

koam said:
I took a look at some guy's source code at work today. He created an entirely new project, and had already written 32 functions and a few classes. There was one comment in the entire code and it was "/* Begin */"
Nice! Were any of the functions and classes actually defined, or just skeleton'ed out?
 
Sega losing source code is an understatement, they in most cases never keep it. At a previous company I worked for, Sega had contracted us to do a pack of their retro titles. When asked for the source code for the titles (approximately 75 genesis and sms titles) Sega responded with "we don't have source code for any of those projects". and even better they suggested we "go out on the internet and download the roms from various rom sites".

!!!! Thread worthy.
 

Valonquar

Member
Read Jam! by Yahtzee Croshaw. Part of it is about a software dev risking violent death and disregarding the safety of anyone preventing him from securing a HDD with source code to his game on it.

The Panzer Dragoon Saga loss is horrible. I want a fully remade version of that game with current gen graphics. Instead we got a substandard regular sequel, followed by an even worse spiritual successor.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom