Chris Shrigley released the assembly sources this news post is about about
ten years ago and it hasn't led to any ports yet.
There have been disassemblies and source releases for decades at this point, yet how many of those games have had modern high-level rewrites with ports to other platforms? Super Mario Bros. is one of the most popular games of all time, has a built-in audience of dedicated hackers and developers, and was likewise disassembled over a decade ago. Where's the PC port? There isn't one.
Disassemblies and assembly source releases of these classic games have been integral to the hacking and speedrun communities, but there's minimal appetite to make modern native ports because it's hard and offers very little reward when emulation already exists, especially when emulators are enhancing games with CPU overclocking, widescreen support, high-resolution scaling and rotation, HD graphics packs, CD-quality music, Lua scripting, etc.
Tempered excitement (
which does not mean no excitement) is the only rational position. You can be excited for what this could lead to, but the likelihood of assembly source releases translating in the short term to modern, enhanced native ports is frankly pretty low. Maybe it will happen, but getting excited about upcoming PC ports of these titles is extremely premature.
Yeah, to be honest I agree with you there, I probably didn't word my previous post the best way regarding these points, so I apologise for sounding a bit obtuse earlier, it is true the amount of work that would be required is a mountain compared to working from already sane C code, in this case.
Given enough interest and dedication there surely could be a way or another to get a port, even if it happens to be a clone which didn't reference any original disassembly code, true 1:1 ports are indeed very rare and difficult to get in the first place.
The only exception I could think of right off the bat is Zelda a Link to the Past, which was, to my understanding, a full disassembly of the game, and then recompiled as C code, but I think it was a really hacked up approach that happened to just work, and isn't representative of anything else that could be done from original ASM sources, in this case.
Still, back to my initial reply, there is still a chance for porting or even recreating code from Assembly sources, at least down to the game code itself, direct hardware and registers trickery would obviously need to be recreated from scratch to work at all, but you get the idea.
That would depend on if anyone has plenty of free time to spend doing this, and I am aware this is something not many people would even bother attempting in the first place unless they are absolutely nut and are really dedicated to it, lol
And I say that as someone who did spend quite some time trying to rewrite (poorly) 6502 ASM routines into humanly legible C++, it is definitely not impossible, but it is definitely not easy either, especially if it is a really complex block of code doing all sort of crazy stuff such as self-modifications during execution, haha!
So, yeah, I can see the problem anyone would get themselves into if they even tried to port not just a few routines, but an entire game with its assets and target machine being decades behind with a CPU architecture that is not compatible either.
There is a reason why emulators exist in the first place, after all.