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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.

Source

 

[FAST6191]

Thanks, that's interesting to know. I guess Donkey Kong Country HD is not going to happen

That gets harder still as the DK SNES series quite famously used 3d models externally rendered as sprites and I am not sure those have ever been released and things are low res enough that recreation is hard compared to something like the vector work for Street Fighter. I am sure with some choice artistic interpretation, high res posters, maybe whatever goes for smash brothers and vintage footage then something could be sorted but that is a very different discussion.

What I will say though is if you are a fan of such things then you might want to check out the remastered soundtrack -- https://gamingreinvented.com/interv...ntry-soundtrack-remasterer-jammin-sam-miller/
Video, channel is that of the guy interviewed there so rest of it should be available there.


Rather than suffer the samples as rendered to fit on cheaper SNES carts people found the originals/original programs and recreated those as they would have been heard by the composer.

Now there is the question of the mixer's/masterer's prerogative (short version is you can master to sound great on 1:1 audible frequency spectrum speakers in an anechoic chamber but the better ones here will make it sound great on the crappiest job site radio instead) and I am not sure what we have in the way of custom emulator setups (it is nothing drastic -- lua scripts should be able to tell when something is playing and play an MP3 instead) to play it with but I note it all anyway.

 

[Ampersound]

HYPEE!
I hope there'll be a vita port afterwards. That would be nuuuuts

 

[godreborn]

I will try to compile this once it's released, if I can. every compile presents its own set of challenges, especially if you don't know what the dependencies are.

 

[Darkworld92]

can't wait to see a native Wii port of this that includes: locked 60fps + widescreen mode + 1:1 wiimote nunchuck combo

 

[ciaomao]

People do also analyse the older games, however as they were written in assembly you are only going to get back assembly.

sure? I think Ghidra can do much more

 

[FAST6191]

sure? I think Ghidra can do much more
View attachment 295606

If something was written in assembly you are only going to get that back out. In the future there might be some super AI or super fun with machine learning* that can create useful equivalents in C (we would want to see that happen for plain assembly with nice labels and whatnot before being turned to disassembled code), or maybe there is an assembly library (see something like HLA https://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/ ) you can convert to/have an equivalent of in C and have the game reference that (similar to how libraries are detected in better decompilation) with a bunch of inline assembly.

Ghidra, Radare2 and the various options from the makers of IDA do tend to have more features to do things, awarenesses of mappings, maybe some awareness of known formats/compilers/concepts or things the user can program in more generally, as well as options to be/attach to a real time debugger, on top of all they do to facilitate a more easy analysis than ye boring and basic static disassembler output in notepad++, however you are still going to be limited to returning to the base state with anything more being what you create yourself.

*some kind of machine learning take on

being what I would expect it to stem from, though could still be a number of closely related concepts (forensic code fingerprinting maybe).

 

[Ecchi95]

As I wished, the same is happening to OoT that happened to SM64. Good times to be alive.

The article says they are doing it with Majora too.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

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.

Never heard of n-Space so had to look them up. Looking at their released games, it doesn't seem like it was a great loss.
And it looks like it was Sony that screwed over Argonaut more so than Nintendo.

 

[codezer0]

Never heard of n-Space so had to look them up. Looking at their released games, it doesn't seem like it was a great loss.
And it looks like it was Sony that screwed over Argonaut more so than Nintendo.

I was able to attend a panel where one of the n-space devs was able to talk about the experience with working with Nintendo.

To boil it down: it was like pulling teeth to get a clear answer, mandatory feature creep and then miyamoto arrived to check out the (near)final build of starfox 64 3d, a week before it was meant to be ready for print/master/gold, and then went "... Where's the gyro controls?" Even though such a feature was never even brought up before that day.

If you can't see why that would be a problem, I really don't understand how you think.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I was able to attend a panel where one of the n-space devs was able to talk about the experience with working with Nintendo.

To boil it down: it was like pulling teeth to get a clear answer, mandatory feature creep and then miyamoto arrived to check out the (near)final build of starfox 64 3d, a week before it was meant to be ready for print/master/gold, and then went "... Where's the gyro controls?" Even though such a feature was never even brought up before that day.

If you can't see why that would be a problem, I really don't understand how you think.

According to any info I can find online, n-Space never had anything to do with Star Fox.

 

[codezer0]

According to any info I can find online, n-Space never had anything to do with Star Fox.

They were under licence by Nintendo to work on the 3ds remake.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

They were under licence by Nintendo to work on the 3ds remake.

Says that was made by Q-Games.

 

[dh3lix-pooch]

So odd that actually this kind of releases make me go back to the time where I missed to play those.

 

[LightBeam]

Can't wait for mods and all that stuff, I'm way more hyped by this than by SM64

 

[Viri]

I look forward to it getting ported to Switch, and seeing how much better it runs than the NSO version.


Also, the PC port with 3DS textures and enhancements would be neat.

Oh, and since OOT decompile finished, it seems MM is now making some more progress! Just remember, we wouldn't have any of these decompile projects, if it wasn't for the NSA.
https://zelda64.dev/games/mm

 

[Ecchi95]

This is the one from vertigo mentioned in the article. Apparently zel is working on that one too.

 

[Thorhax]

Why do I feel that Nintendo is gonna take this port down? They've already taken out the Super Mario 64 PC port, saying that they'll do the same with Zelda is worthless now.

The real question is why wouldn't they take it down????

So whenever that download link comes up, get it while you can.

 

[Ecchi95]

I will try to compile this once it's released, if I can. every compile presents its own set of challenges, especially if you don't know what the dependencies are.

The PC port by vertigo was just released. (dev branch)

https://github.com/blawar/ooot

@relauby the other port mentioned in the article by vertigo was released. Separate from the Harbour Masters one. Are you going to put the github in your post?

 

[godreborn]

The PC port by vertigo was just released. (dev branch)

https://github.com/blawar/ooot

@relauby the other port mentioned in the article by vertigo was released. Separate from the Harbour Masters one. Are you going to put the github in your post?

I was able to extract the assets, but I encountered a problem with python:

 

[godreborn]

nm, I didn't realize that was a python command. I was able to compile Glide, I think. I'll know after transferring the folder from the wsl drive to the desktop if I was successful at compiling.