Honestly it's amazing how fresh these elements have stayed over the years. The rag dolls are so exaggerated it's really funny. It was like an early version of Goat Simulator.
Yep, I'm surprised how quickly we phase out perfectly healthy machines, just because the software quality keeps getting lower and lower. It's not good for the climate, among other things. I appreciate how zealous the Notepad++ developers are about performance and efficiency.
Imagine being able to play these games on ARM without emulation? This is also one of my goals, but as stated in the article, the effort to port them without source code is substantial.
Quite possible. In the article I mention that a Lithuanian hacker by the name of notaz statically recompiled StarCraft, Diablo 1 & 2. But it's a huge effort, of course. Even better would be to (partially) decompile to, say, C for better performance.
It should be possible to automate translation of the machine code? I've disassembled pure binary with a tool before. How much more work to re-emit ARM? Especially with modern executable formats including debug info, identification of code and data segments etc. which was problematic with pure binary
I'm not an expert on the topic, but the way from a x86/x64 disassembly to an ARM binary is very long. The identification of segments is not 100% accurate, manual corrections will be required, addresses have to updated etc. I'd say fully automatic translation is not really feasible, but I expect to be contradicted :)
This is exactly why I prefer Notepad++, it's resource efficient, it doesn't matter where you run it on. Even on the Raspberry Pi the performance is quite decent.
It was very frustrating at times, I cannot lie... It's my favorite editor though, so I just HAD to do it. Now I have to compile all of the plugins I use.
