The Future of Game Preservation is Decomp-Annotated-Recomps
1379.tech · 1379.tech · 2026-08-17
Why the recomp-versus-decomp debate misses the point, argued with a one-line Super Mario World physics mod.
The most recent essay from the team argues that recompilation and decompilation are not competitors but 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 demonstrates altering Mario's horizontal movement physics by overriding a single named address.
It also shows where the ceiling is 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.