[nebula8804]

I mean if people are reverse engineering entire n64 games into its original code that can target the original SGI compilers, then it is possible to reverse this other code. I don't think there is a drive to do so though. Thats where I hope some future LLM could help lower that barrier to people already well experienced in reversing.

>And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potential, simply put, not each quirk of the legacy format has been carried over to the "new" XML storage format, and certainly not into OpenOffice XML.

Can modern Office reliably open the old formats? If so they must have implemented the parsers correctly no?

[mschuster91]

> Can modern Office reliably open the old formats? If so they must have implemented the parsers correctly no?

It can. But at two costs: first, MS has to keep all that legacy garbage code around - and we all know that just blindly deserializing stuff from potentially hostile input raw into C structs is ripe for getting exploited, and there have been a lot of bugs in there. And the second cost is, you can't reliably save an old document into a new XML document, hence the warning you get "this document was created in an old version of Office, are you sure you want to save it".