Is it actually possible to just rewrite a GCN/Wii game into a PC game?

[slax65]

Hi there,

so please don't laugh at me, I don't know a ** about informatics. But I was wondering, while you guys know how a Wii works and how to build up an emulator that can translate the things that are within the iso wouldn't it be possible to just rewrite an iso into an actual pc game? I guess it's a pretty stupid question cauze why would we all be grappling with emulators if this was possible, right?

[Benze]

You would require the sourcecode of the game and recompile for your target architecture (PCs are usually x86, phones use mostly ARM etc.). With only the ISO this is not possible as far as i know. You can not get the source code from that. You would have to rewrite the entire game and use some serious reverse engineering.

[JosJuice]

You can do this in theory, but it requires a lot of work, and all of that work would need to be done once for each game you want to play.

[lamedude]

Possible but infeasible.  They've been working on Open Morrowind for 7 years and still aren't done.

[AnyOldName3]

Yeah, but it's like a month from being finished, tops, and has a lot of things most console games wouldn't have such as a script interpreter/compiler, and being a Bethesda game, some things which appear to be bugs are required for some parts of the game to function. Also the scope's a lot bigger than a lot of Nintendo games. It's not the best example, as it's a particularly extreme case.

[Fiora]

Most games, console games included, do have a script interpreter. But the hard part is typically that you'd have to rewrite the entire base engine because it was designed for completely different system. The process is called "porting" the game.

[AnyOldName3]

I'd always assumed most games compiled their scripts all the way down, and it was just stuff supposed to be super-moddable that used scripts or bytecode, and even then, most used a sane language.

[Fiora]

Lua is really really common in games nowadays; see here. Speed of scripting systems typically doesn't matter too much because they're what you use to control game logic, mission scripts, etc, not slow things that require a whole lot of computation. Though even Lua has a JIT available (luajit), and the language (like python) is compiled to bytecode before being run.