Modders Port PS2 Platformer Jak & Daxter To PC
The classic PS2 platformer Jak & Daxter has now been ported to PC thanks to a team of rather ingenious modders. While planety of older games have been made playable on PC in recent years through emulation, this represents an actual port of Jak & Daxter, meaning that instead of imitating the hardware, players can run the program natively on their platform of choice.
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Similar to recent projects working with Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the process of porting Jak & Daxter to PC involves decompiling the original program. The trick is that unlike these classic Nintendo 64 games, Jak & Daxter was created using a proprietary programming language that by now has been all but forgotten. According to the modders, “over 98 percent of this game is written in GOAL, a custom Lisp language.” The developer behind the game, Naughty Dog, released Jak & Daxter on December 3, 2001.
The people behind this impressive project somehow managed to decompile the source code, create a compiler to make the program run on current systems, develop a tool to extract the game assets, and finally to “create tools to repack game assets into a format that our port uses.”
The relevant files can be found on the project website. While the port remains a work in progress, “most of the renderers and sound are finished, but there are still a few bugs.” According to the modders, “we've decompiled around 400,000 lines of GOAL code out of an estimated 500,000 total lines from the original game. We have a working OpenGL renderer which renders most of the game world and foreground. Levels are fully playable and you can finish the game with 100 percent completion!”
The next steps include
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