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Sure, you're obviously a popular person and your friends/family are always more important than updating software. But if you wanted to, you _can_ update dead F

• dleslie 6y ago
  Not quite, there are ways. The Diablo mod community is an excellent example: before the debug symbols were found on the psx release, the common method was to inject instructions directly into the binary. Similarly, Fallout and the Infinity engine games have mods that patch binaries and replace DLLs.
  • fartcannon 6y ago
    Yes, that's right, certainly easier than having the source. Your friends and family must appreciate the time you saved them by injecting DLLS. You'd better hope you efforts don't get DMCA'd. Summarizing, closed source projects die. At best you can run them in an elaborate museum (emulator) and at worse, you can attempt to Frankenstein's monster them by injecting DLLs. Open source will outlive us all. How many places does Doom run?
    • dleslie 6y ago
      Bin patching won't get you DMCA'd, and it's really not so different than writing a shim nowadays. Tooling has come a long way. Doom is a closed source game that was finished, polished, and then open sourced. Strange to use that as a FOSS example. The FOSS-from-the-start examples would be Tux Racer, 0ad, and so on.
      • fartcannon 6y ago
        And yet, here we are running Doom on our toasters, refrigerators and watches.