[swiftcoder]

Reverse engineering and pirating are not the same thing (although the former may certainly be used as a means to achieve the latter). As long as you aren't distributing the game, distributing code that legitimate owners of the game can use to run their game on more platforms is not a crime.

[Quothling]

In systems engineering this was proven in court when you have one engineer writing specs and another implementing the "samish" system from those specs, but I'm not sure that would relate to any of the art assets made by the original authors of a game. I'd imagine any art, narrative writing or sound would still be considered IP, and without those things you don't have much of a game.

I suspect it won't stop people, and that it won't be much of an issue in a lot of cases. I wouldn't want to be the one to test it in any sort of court though. Not even on the other side of things, where it'll become even more of a nightmare to protect your indie IP on any form of platform which doesn't heavily regulate things.

[charcircuit]

>distributing code

The code is also copyrighted and owning a license for a game does not make you safe from being sued for pirating that game or its code. It's fine in this case only because the engine was open sourced.

[Fnoord]

> The code is also copyrighted and owning a license for a game does not make you safe from being sued for pirating that game or its code. It's fine in this case only because the engine was open sourced.

Nothing makes you safe from getting sued.

See also: [1]. You could also reverse engineer in a solid jurisdiction.

I ran C&C Generals in Wine on Linux back in the days. More stable than Windows XP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

[swiftcoder]

You may run afoul of DCMA rules around circumventing copy protection measures, and you are most likely going to be violating the EULA on any recent games. But you aren't necessarily violating any copyrights - several high-profile cases in the US have been fought about this, such as Sony vs Connectix, and its generally fallen on the side of reverse-engineering for interoperability being within the bounds of fair use

(as always, IANAL)

[charcircuit]

Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc. establishes the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test for determining if a program is infringing on another program. Reverse engineered code of a nontrivial portion of the original program will have substantial similarity to the original program and will fail this test.

Interoperability falls under what gets filtered out in the filtration step of the test.