Ocarina of Time fan PC port expected to release in April

Screenshot-of-Link-as-an-adult-from-Ocarina-of-Time-Nintendo-1998.png

Last November, the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team successfully reverse-engineered the entire source code to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. After this happened with Super Mario 64 in 2019, a PC port soon followed, and it looks as though the same will be happening with Ocarina of Time soon. Speaking to VGC, a group calling themselves Harbour Masters have announced that they're working on a PC port of the project, and that they're expecting to release it at the beginning of April. “I’d give it approximately 90%. We’ve been hoping to be complete by the middle of February and use a month or so until April 1st to refine the game before release," said Kenix, a developer from the group. "We’re hoping to have a public repository available in late February.”

The group also plans to make a number of enhancements to the original title, like widescreen support and plans for a 60fps release down the line. Harbour Masters' port will also make modding easier for their title, allowing for HD texture packs or other enhancements to be more easily made, because "[their] game has an asset loading pipeline much more similar to modern games."

Like the Super Mario 64 decompilation, it's unlikely this project will be taken offline because the team wrote new code by deconstructing Ocarina of Time, rather than basing it off of leaked proprietary documents. "We packed assets into an external archive," Kenix told VGC. "No assets are linked into the exe. Our belief is that this will prevent a DMCA takedown from Nintendo as SM64 linked all of the assets into the .exe file." Only executables that included those assets were struck by Nintendo; the reverse-engineered code itself was fine. However, Take-Two is currently taking legal action against similar decompilation projects, so only time will tell if things are safe for this project.

You can follow Harbour Masters' progress on their Discord server.

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MikaDubbz

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Which begs the question... why the actual fuck was Navi put in at all? Isn't Miyamoto's ego law? It's for his tantrums that nintendo directly screwed over: Rare, n-space, and argonaut software, to name a few third parties burned by the big N.
I'm sure there have been many things he's wanted in games in the past, to only in retrospect think that they aren't such a great inclusion. Navi made sense for the time, it was a 3D Zelda, the first for the franchise, in the very early days of 3D console gaming at that. Having some sort of bothersome guide probably seemed like a necessary evil at the time. Just look at how toned back Tatl is in Majora's Mask after players much more clearly understood how a 3D Zelda game functioned, it's clear that Miyamota recognized fairly quickly that they overdid it with Navi, or that gamers just kinda understood far better what it was they were to do in a 3D Zelda game now.
 

MadMakuFuuma

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Which begs the question... why the actual fuck was Navi put in at all? Isn't Miyamoto's ego law? It's for his tantrums that nintendo directly screwed over: Rare, n-space, and argonaut software, to name a few third parties burned by the big N.
navi is there as "tag" (aka lock on enemies, talk to people etc locking with z). the real question is: why the hell he/she talks "hey LISTEN" every 2 seconds, and who tought it was a good idea?
 

godreborn

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navi is there as "tag" (aka lock on enemies, talk to people etc locking with z). the real question is: why the hell he/she talks "hey LISTEN" every 2 seconds, and who tought it was a good idea?
That hey listen thing was getting on my nerves. I just got to Ganon on the nso version, but I ran out of arrows in the shadow room of Ganon's castle, so I went to buy some arrows in kakariko village, and navi kept saying that I needed to rescue princess zelda. I was thinking, no shit!
 
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sley

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Really cool, aside from 60 FPS I'm really interested in the ability to mod in high poly models.
We might finally see a true OOT HD with the 3D Models!

They should implement all the stuff that was left behind. You know, medallions, items, dungeon designs, Link's attacks, the Portal mechanic featured in Forest Temple.
You might want to check this out
 
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codezer0

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Read the thread
You preclude that Nintendo legal operates on sense. You sweet, summer child... :wub:

The only thing more petty and douchey than Nintendo legal, is Sony, who repeatedly tried to demand prison time for Geohot despite their lack of evidence to make anything material stick beyond "he guessed the signing key". :!:
 

M7L7NK7

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You preclude that Nintendo legal operates on sense. You sweet, summer child... :wub:

The only thing more petty and douchey than Nintendo legal, is Sony, who repeatedly tried to demand prison time for Geohot despite their lack of evidence to make anything material stick beyond "he guessed the signing key". :!:
They've had years to go after the Mario 64 decomp, plus the other decomps that are in progress
 
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Noctosphere

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its a small fan project and it looks absolutely terrible
I must admit the aiming is to rework, but overall it's not that bad tbh

In the latest version, they included a model of Iwata in front of Kakarikoo, when you talk to him, he says
''On my business card, i'm a CEO
In my mind, i'm a game developper
But in my heart, i'm a gamer''
It's a famous phrase he once said
 

FAST6191

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Cool stuff.till

Why is this primarily done on 3d stuff though and never happened e.g. for SNES titles?
It does happen to an extent. The various efforts with Streets of Rage (Beats of Rage through things like Streets of Rage remake are also of note here) and Sonic (granted both megadrive efforts) being among the more notable in that world.

The main reason it is happening for this sort of thing though is 2d stuff prior to the GBA and DS was largely written in assembly code (a complicated way of writing code where you are basically responsible for holding the hand of the CPU throughout everything, hard to learn, hard to port, hard to debug, hard to make radical changes in your code*). PS1 and N64 then being C code which can be decompiled back into C code via a fancy program and complicated analysis of it (no comments, usually no labels, you then making labels and figuring out what the original devs intended to accomplish -- there are only so many ways to move a sprite or sensibly perform an action in coding).
It also means there is a cap -- C++ is so much more useful for coding games (see object oriented vs procedural if you want a search term to start off with there) but the additional complexity means decompilation is a far greater ask compared to plain old C. Anyway being so much better then when the systems became powerful enough to handle it (and it does have a bit of overhead compared to C or assembly, not as much as some things though) then devs jumped at the chance to use it. This means don't expect much in the way of PS2, xbox and gamecube games, and what you do get will probably be the results of source releases, leaks and the occasional bit of luck finding information in ports (the GTA on PC/Vita/Switch/... stuff largely stems from the mobile ports, Diablo from a quirk of the PS1 release and devs leave things in games all the time). PC stuff made the leap earlier so any PC stuff will probably be a generation behind that for the most part, and PC stuff mostly gave up on assembly (it lingered as it is really fast if you know what you are doing) before that -- the 89 in C89, which was the first major C standard but was around before then, being the year. Slim exception for later things using higher level runtime languages -- Java, python, lua, C#/.net to some extent... as you might be able to pick those apart.
People do also analyse the older games, however as they were written in assembly you are only going to get back assembly. Still have a look for complete/commented disassembly/disassemblies ( https://archives.glitchcity.info/wiki/List_of_Pokémon_disassembly_projects.html , https://gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722 for the original super mario on the NES https://github.com/Entroper/FF1Disassembly https://www.romhacking.net/?page=documents&category=13 and several other things out there, including many sequels to those games mentioned).

*there is a reason https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor and similar such sites have a lot of stuff on older games when cutting a feature usually meant just ignoring that section of code and stopping it from being run as changing it meant everything after it, which could be several thousand aspects of code and data, would be in a new location and you have to go figure all that out. Today the computer handles that for you so leaks become the more dominant means of finding things, though hackers (some news sites that don't know how things work call them data miners) still find the odd thing buried in text strings or data that gets pushed before the code update, and artwork is still much the same as before as nobody can be bothered to spend a day cleaning out junk to save a few megabytes.
 
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Nada

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It does happen to an extent. The various efforts with Streets of Rage (Beats of Rage through things like Streets of Rage remake are also of note here) and Sonic (granted both megadrive efforts) being among the more notable in that world.

The main reason it is happening for this sort of thing though is 2d stuff prior to the GBA and DS was largely written in assembly code (a complicated way of writing code where you are basically responsible for holding the hand of the CPU throughout everything, hard to learn, hard to port, hard to debug, hard to make radical changes in your code*). PS1 and N64 then being C code which can be decompiled back into C code via a fancy program and complicated analysis of it (no comments, usually no labels, you then making labels and figuring out what the original devs intended to accomplish -- there are only so many ways to move a sprite or sensibly perform an action in coding).
It also means there is a cap -- C++ is so much more useful for coding games (see object oriented vs procedural if you want a search term to start off with there) but the additional complexity means decompilation is a far greater ask compared to plain old C. Anyway being so much better then when the systems became powerful enough to handle it (and it does have a bit of overhead compared to C or assembly, not as much as some things though) then devs jumped at the chance to use it. This means don't expect much in the way of PS2, xbox and gamecube games, and what you do get will probably be the results of source releases, leaks and the occasional bit of luck finding information in ports (the GTA on PC/Vita/Switch/... stuff largely stems from the mobile ports, Diablo from a quirk of the PS1 release and devs leave things in games all the time). PC stuff made the leap earlier so any PC stuff will probably be a generation behind that for the most part, and PC stuff mostly gave up on assembly (it lingered as it is really fast if you know what you are doing) before that -- the 89 in C89, which was the first major C standard but was around before then, being the year. Slim exception for later things using higher level runtime languages -- Java, python, lua, C#/.net to some extent... as you might be able to pick those apart.
People do also analyse the older games, however as they were written in assembly you are only going to get back assembly. Still have a look for complete/commented disassembly/disassemblies ( https://archives.glitchcity.info/wiki/List_of_Pokémon_disassembly_projects.html , https://gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722 for the original super mario on the NES https://github.com/Entroper/FF1Disassembly https://www.romhacking.net/?page=documents&category=13 and several other things out there, including many sequels to those games mentioned).

*there is a reason https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor and similar such sites have a lot of stuff on older games when cutting a feature usually meant just ignoring that section of code and stopping it from being run as changing it meant everything after it, which could be several thousand aspects of code and data, would be in a new location and you have to go figure all that out. Today the computer handles that for you so leaks become the more dominant means of finding things, though hackers (some news sites that don't know how things work call them data miners) still find the odd thing buried in text strings or data that gets pushed before the code update, and artwork is still much the same as before as nobody can be bothered to spend a day cleaning out junk to save a few megabytes.
Thanks, that's interesting to know. I guess Donkey Kong Country HD is not going to happen:)
 

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