Space Channel 5: another casualty?
It has been in my mind for some time that the reason we have not seen a port of the original Space Channel 5 to a current system is because the assets are lost. Like Panzer Dragoon Saga, and more recently, Kingdom Hearts, SC5 was obviously a victim of the lost source issue. When you look at the PS2 port, you can see various nuances like the introduction voice clips ("Ulala's Swingin' Report Show!") are from the japanese version and not the original english one (both are said in english but the difference is clear). Given what's been said about Silent Hill HD collection being salvaged from earlier builds and partly reverse engineered, we should not be quick to assume that because a game is more modern, and because storage was more widely available, that these games are not casualties waiting to happen. The more epic and huge a game gets, the more difficult and time consuming it can be to reverse engineer it. However, with Kingdom Hearts, Nomura said that they salvaged most of what they could from the retail copy for the PS3 remaster, then redid other parts of the code completely. He simply said, "It was not easy."