The Future of Game Preservation is Decomp-Annotated-Recomps
1379.tech · 1379.tech · 2026-08-17
One named address, one line of code, and Mario moves differently: why recomp versus decomp was never the real fight.
The most recent essay from the team argues that recompilation and decompilation are not rivals. They are layers of the same preservation strategy. A recomp gets a game running natively now; disassembly annotations then make that output progressively more source-like.
The concrete example is Super Mario World, where 1,937 of the recompiled game's 2,074 functions carry real names from disassembly data. That density is what turns a one-line change into a real mod: the essay alters Mario's horizontal movement physics by overriding a single named address.
It also shows what opens up once a game is code instead of a ROM inside an emulator: NES-framework tech demos running 3D skeletal models, 44.1 kHz audio mixing, and particle effects, none of which the original hardware could do. The through-line is that framework improvements compound. Every new game exposes an assumption hiding in the shared runtime, and fixing it benefits every other title.
Related: Super Mario World on Super Nintendo.