The Nintendo 64 emulator that brought Ocarina of Time to the Gamecube has been fully decompiled
Back in the early 2000s, Nintendo re-released their (at the time) 3D Zeldas from the Nintendo 64 console for their then brand new console, the Nintendo Gamecube.
The first re-release was back in February 2003, in the form of a dual bundle disc, which came as a pre-order bonus for people who ordered The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This re-release included the original Ocarina of Time, and a brand new reworked version of the original OoT called "Master Quest", which remixed all of the original game's dungeons to be more challenging.
The second re-release came in the form of The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition, which included a demo for The Wind Waker, the original NES The Legend of Zelda, as well as its NES sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, followed by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and finally, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, all bundled in a single disc.
These two re-releases for the Nintendo Gamecube were not actual native ports of the original games, but rather they relied on a custom-made Nintendo 64 emulator by Nintendo of America (and also the NES titles), alongside the original ROMs of the games within the disc, and while the emulator was far from perfect, with Majora's Mask specifically suffering from several drawbacks, with the most prominent being a random crash/freeze that required the player to completely reset the game (those familiar with Majora's Mask save system can know the hurdle), the emulator did its job in bringing these beloved titles from the previous generation to the current one at the time. This N64 emulator by Nintendo themselves, was later reworked and repurposed for use for the Wii's Virtual Console and its measly 21 titles.
Now, thanks to the great effort and research made by Zelda Reverse Engineering Team, also known as ZeldaRET, the Nintendo 64 emulator used on the Gamecube to bring these titles to light has been fully decompiled. With this, some interesting details about the development of the emulator, and also, Nintendo's early dealings in emulation as a whole to bring older titles to modern consoles, could be explored in more detail, and additionally, further research on this emulator could also help towards possibly improving the emulator and bringing a more stable and up-to-date Nintendo 64 emulator for both the Gamecube and the Wii, or even aiding in improving currently existing emulators for the system with currently known Not64 and Cube64 emulators for GC and Wii as well.
Source ZeldaRET OoT GC Decompilation on GitHub
