Plus, wouldn't ya think Nintendo would've gone after the original Mario 64 decomp by now? That's been available for about 2 years and still is up.
It is truly a mystery of the day for me. From where I sit all the copyright law is on Nintendo's side -- decompiling copyrighted code makes a completely unambiguous derived work from said material. Plenty of other companies smack things down here all the time, and Nintendo have shown themselves time and time again to be watching things very closely and be lawyer happy.
The only reason I can imagine them not going for it is in the event the court case does not go their way (maybe their lawyer found some obscure legal analysis) and by quirk of law (sure to be shut down at earliest convenience) it turns out not only is it legal but you can release it under GPL or something (as opposed to "for information purposes only" that most of these seem to adopt) that they don't want to be the one that causes that where today it is mostly only the same crowd that would be playing with ROMs, or indeed hacked ROMs, that bother and that will just go underground (not hard to set up a git server and build tools on something like TOR network).
Does anyone know if there's a similar reverse-engineering going on for Majora's Mask? I'd love to see the hacking community take off for that game.
For the most part assume any vaguely popular N64 game is getting this treatment (for instance the project doing it for a Kirby game discovered a hidden menu that was previously unknown so we know at least there is that
https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintend...-cheat-code-discovered-21-years-later.585818/ ), and as we are some years out from C++ decompilation then it is not like everybody is suddenly going to discover the PS360 tomorrow and do things there instead so there is some staying power. Timelines for things vary dramatically depending upon the difficulty of the game to do it (the N64 featured some quite custom hardware that devs would play to*), skill of those doing decompilation (it is still a very skilled action despite computers being fast enough and computer based techniques advanced enough to render it a possibility vs what halting problem would have us believe), time available for those doing the decompilation, end goal of decompilation as in "1:1 vs 1:1 with comments vs just works" and more besides.
Most of them will be more like ROM hacking projects in that you might get an announcement somewhere but more likely it will be a surprise one day, and if you are the sort of person that can help with it you are probably already moving in those circles or can expect a PM one day seeing if you are up for it.
*not really a deep dive but covers a start of things in the emulation issues section if you did want a primer
I should also note it might not be that hard to do a conversion between Ocarina and Majora's like we sometimes see for various "Doom clones" that did not get a source release but were still substantially similar engines -- it is largely the same engine with a few additions (most of which are known to the player), similar formats internally and so forth.
But the game itself, characters, levels, story, music is also owned by nintendo.
Unless they release it under a different name, levels ect then nintendont could still go for them.
Regardless if they rebuilt the game using none of nintendonts code, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in itself is still nintendonts property, making fan based games using the same name is the issue as stated no reverse engineering of their IPs is permitted and is protected by law, you cannot distribute without permission of the licence owner.
And unfortunately no matter how you look at it, this is still a direct clone of a game owned by nintendont.
Same how they shut down a go kart company for dressing up as nintendont characters.
Its using their licensed properties without permission.
Yeah I said as much, though you are confusing a variety of terms and concepts in that.
The name part is trademark law. That being names of products, logos and whatever that your customers (which does include little old grandmas) might associate with your product and buy/obtain on faith and expectations of quality associated with your company.
I also agree the game's underlying code (for which this is not any kind of known workaround for replicating, and there are some**) falls under copyright, the characters (which could be trademark depending upon what they did -- pokemon wise I have not looked but would not generally expect anything that has not appeared in a smash brothers game, be it playable or pokeball, is going to be trademarked even if the drawings associated with it would be copyrighted), levels, story and music then being copyrighted works. However as most of these projects are all "you need to provide the original ROM for this so it can rip, convert and embed it all into this" then they dodge that aspect of it (still have the code issue).
The gokart thing was Japanese law, though broadly similar, and more in the trademark thing from what I saw of it all. Probably them not wanting the eventual headache when someone lost a game of beat the bus and someone took a picture of Mario as a red smear on the Japanese streets (and then the fun parts of the internet coming along and making a comedy edit in poor taste).
**see clean room reverse engineering (though again as in a post above I would not expect a 100 strong team that started day 1 of the game's release and full time ever since to be anywhere close to this right now), and that is also not withstanding the reverse engineering for copyright analysis (did Nintendo steal your/your client's code to make their game?), interoperability (which is possibly the reason for their reticence in filing lawsuits here like I would expect), disability access and whatever else gets trotted out in the "substantial non infringing uses" discussions of emulation and legalities thereof, or DMCA exemptions if in a place where that is in play.
Source
