Comment by bri3d

Yeah, at least in the case of most Naughty Dog games the main ELF binary is in itself a little binary format loader that fixes up and relocates proprietary binaries (compiled GOAL LISP) as they are streamed in by the IOP. It would probably be a bit pointless to recompile Naughty Dog games this way anyway though; since the GOAL compiler didn’t do a lot of optimization, the original code can be recovered fairly effectively (OpenGOAL) and recompiled from that source.