The Ocarina of Time decompilation project is complete, source code fully reverse engineered

zelda.png

After two hard years of work, the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team has finished one of their biggest projects: recreating The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's source code, from scratch. We've seen similar successful attempts in the past, such as when Super Mario 64 was also decompiled, which spawned further fan projects that saw the game ported to the Nintendo Switch before Nintendo could, and with widescreen and 60fps support, to boot.

This is a WIP decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The purpose of the project is to recreate a source code base for the game from scratch, using information found inside the game along with static and/or dynamic analysis. It is not producing a PC port.

Currently, the official website for the decompilation shows the project at 98% completion, as the last finishing touches are done, but are yet to be submitted as a pull request on the project's GitHub. Once it's completed and publically available, it's likely we'll see PC ports and mods being made--not from the ZRET team themselves though, as they want to focus purely on documenting their work and trying to reverse engineer different versions of Ocarina of Time and other Zelda games. For now, the decompilation applies to the Master Quest release of Ocarina of Time on the GameCube.

We thought for a time that we may never be able to match every function completely, so this is an incredibly exciting accomplishment. Dozens of people helped work on this project, and together we were able to achieve something amazing.

If you're looking for other Zelda fan projects to tide you over until the decompilation is released, then you might want to check out the Spaceworld '97 Experience romhack, which came out last week.

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HellGhast

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Cool, just keep yo fingers crossed that Nintendont don't seek their lawyers on these guys and shut this down like how most fan projects get shut down nowadays.
 

Chary

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Cool, just keep yo fingers crossed that Nintendont don't seek their lawyers on these guys.
Nintendo only went after the projects made with the decompilation, iirc. The Super Mario 64 reverse engineered source code is still available on GitHub, while say, the PC port is not
 

Jiehfeng

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In my computing class at school, I learnt that even viewing source code of paid programs is illegal, so how is the excuse of creating a separate base game by looking at the source code even an alternate route to get out of trouble? :unsure:
 

Jokey_Carrot

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In my computing class at school, I learnt that even viewing source code of paid programs is illegal, so how is the excuse of creating a separate base game by looking at the source code even an alternate route to get out of trouble? :unsure:
It's legal because the source code has been obtained by reverse engineering the compiled assembly code into source code with no other resources but the original rom file. It'd only be illegal if the source code was obtained by other means such as a leak.
 

Jiehfeng

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It's legal because the source code has been obtained by reverse engineering the compiled assembly code into source code with no other resources but the original rom file. It'd only be illegal if the source code was obtained by other means such as a leak.

That honestly sounds fair game, thanks for the explanation.
 

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