Viewing source code?

[Papermariomaster]

I'm making a paper mario fan-game and there are a lot of tiny details about Paper Mario TTYD that I don't think I could recreate just by looking at and observing. Things like marios animation for example, if you go into freelook mode you'll see that each of his body parts are seperate, meaning the animation is in the code and when you dump textures you just get the seperate body parts. Also things like the math for leveling up and such. I was wondering if it was possible to like... Decompile the game and view its source code?

[Benze]

As far as I know, decompiling wii/gc games is impossible.

[Aleron Ives]

Decompilation is not the same thing as source code. Decompiling a binary allows you to view the machine instructions that the program runs more easily than simply by looking at the original file in a hex editor. The source code was used to create those instructions and is not part of the program itself. Only the original developers have the source code.

[Shonumi]

@Aleron Ives - I think you meant to say disassembly. Decompilation generally attempts to translate assembly or machine code into some higher level language, and can be used to reconstruct source code (to varying degrees of success). Disassembly just breaks down the code into assembly opcodes and mnemonics. Disassembly goes hand-in-hand with emulator debuggers, and Dolphin has a disassembler, naturally. It does not decompile the PPC code back into whatever language it was initially written in (C, C++ I guess), although it recompiles a lot into x86 and ARM assembly.

@OP - Your best bet would be learning PPC assembly and how the GC works. If you know what to look at, say whenever a texture or polygon changes in a certain way, you'll know where to look (e.g. checkout what code is updating the relevant registers that are responsible for that behavior). Obviously that's a lot to learn, especially if it's just trying to make a fangame. All the time and investment you spend becoming a console hacker would probably be better spent carefully observing Paper Mario and coming up with your own methods to recreate them. The walking animation for a Paper Mario game is definitely not as simple as it would be in other Mario fangames, but not impossible to do it.

[Aleron Ives]

Thanks for the correction. Derp.