I see a lot about source codes being leaked and I’m wondering how it that you could make something like an exact replica of Super Mario Bros without the source code or how you can’t take the finished product and run it back through the compilation software?
You can. It’s called decompiling. Problem is you lose all the human friendly metadata that was in the original source code, meaning comments, variable names, certain code structures are lost forever because it was deleted in the compilation process. There are tools to help you reintroduce that stuff by going through the variables and trying to make sense out of what they were for but it’s super tedious. With new ai tech that can certainly be improved with AI guessing what they were for but you’ll never get the original meta data back.