[georgemcbay]

Yeah, this is really cool and the poster did a great job of writing it up and making everything available.

His bit on the legality of this sort of thing when done without permission should be ignored, though (to be fair, he does offer the standard IANAL disclaimer). If you made graphics/sound/music that were totally unique, you'd be fine, but if you made higher resolution versions of what already existed that is clearly a derivative work and puts you in copyright violation trouble, if the copyright owner cares to go after you.

Also, as you mentioned this method wouldn't work that great for all platforms; basically any older console or older console-like computer (eg. Amiga, Atari ST) tends to have much more complicated interplay between the graphics being drawn and the hardware (real or emulated) in terms of timing (eg. to vsync/vblank), having the graphics actually be low-level commands to a coprocessor, etc. Once you get to the PC era where games are generally using a relatively straightforward memcpy-type bitblt you're fine, but before that all bets are off, at the very least the code you are patching in is likely to be much more complex and fragile, if it could be made to work at all.

[ggambetta]

About the legality, for "totally new art", sure, but if I play an X-Wing remake I want Darth Vader to look like Darth Vader... and as you say, a higher-res Darth Vader would probably infringe something.