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Another title from the Zelda franchise joins the ranks today for fully decompiled projects, just in time for the holiday season as well.

This time, the title that reached 100% on its decompilation is the GBA title, The Minish Cap, which sees Link going through Hyrule and learning about the Picori and the dark mage, Vaati, who placed a curse on Link.

The decompilation for The Minish Cap has been worked on for several years now, and it has been worked on by the same Zelda decomp team that did the Ocarina of Time decomp, ZeldaRET (or Zelda Reverse Engineering Team), this is also the same team that's also working on the decompilation for Majora's Mask, which is currently around 80% complete.

With this, we could expect a PC port coming soon once people start working out the workings of the decomp to make ports to other systems as well.

Source

 

[V10lator]

Buddy you couldn't code your self a hello world

Maybe check my GitHub before making such useless statements. So do you have anything to say or are you just attacking my coding skills?

Just for the lols, try to compile it:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    printf("Hello world for jurai\n");
    return 0;
}

 

[Missing Number]

can it has multiplayer? the Z2 and Awakening were nice, but it would be better with a friend

 

[gameboy64]

nintendo has a great reputation on taking down great things made by fans hopefully it doesn't include this one

 

[Avalyn]

Im still waiting for wind Waker and twilight princess 100% decomp. Those old games I can easy emulate on anything

You can emulate these on anything too. Dolphin is amazing.

 

[HextarVigar]

nintendo has a great reputation on taking down great things made by fans hopefully it doesn't include this one

Well, maybe if people shut the fuck up about it instead of bragging openly in public of it's existence. these sorts of things would last longer.

Use word of mouth and not a megaphone.

 

[retrospect]

Wow good to see !

Btw I wonder, why did the few last percents took like > a year to achieve ?
As I remember it was around 98% since many time, are the latest steps longer ?

80/20 rule.

 

[V10lator]

I wonder, why did the few last percents took like > a year to achieve ?
As I remember it was around 98% since many time, are the latest steps longer ?

Because it needs time to get the functions matching. The last few % you talk about are probaby functions they worked on since years (way longer than it said around 98%). Other, more simple functions got finished but these one wheren't easy to match.

 

[gameboy64]

Well, maybe if people shut the fuck up about it instead of bragging openly in public of it's existence. these sorts of things would last longer.

Use word of mouth and not a megaphone.

It doesn't matter because in the end Nintendo will probably take it down...

 

[Reshiban]

80/20 rule.

what is this rule o_o

 

[retrospect]

what is this rule o_o

Like, the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the time, and vice-versa.

 

[gangan]

I was referring to the yet-to-exist PC port.

Those ports still require you to compile it yourself using a ROM. Just like how SoH works with OOT.

 

[YoureALoser]

It doesn't matter because in the end Nintendo will probably take it down...

Stop spreading misinformation. Nintendo will not "probably take it down" because Nintendo has no legal standing. Not a single line of code was written by Nintendo & no assets are shared. like yourself really need to stop thinking you know how things work in the real world.

 

[gameboy64]

Stop spreading misinformation. Nintendo will not "probably take it down" because Nintendo has no legal standing. Not a single line of code was written by Nintendo & no assets are shared. like yourself really need to stop thinking you know how things work in the real world.

Calm down man it's just a game and I said "probably" meaning I don't know it either nobody knows for sure. If you think you're right then great just take a quick look at fan-made projects and you will see what I mean but I guess it's stupid to argue online anyway...

 

[Graxer]

Calm down man it's just a game and I said "probably" meaning I don't know it either nobody knows for sure. If you think you're right then great just take a quick look at fan-made projects and you will see what I mean but I guess it's stupid to argue online anyway...

A properly executed port is different from other fan made projects for exactly the same reason projects like the Mario 64 PC port and Ship of Harkinian haven't been taken down. The decompilation was written with a clean room approach. The code was written to replicate the original code exactly, but the code itself is not a copy of Nintendo's code and they didn't look at Nintendo's source code for reference.

What the Super Mario 64 PC Port and Ship of Harkinian teams distribute are applications that take a ROM that they don't provide and pull assets such as textures, models and music from them (basically anything that is copyrighted) from the ROM itself and recompile them into a PC port. Nintendo hasn't been able to take the projects down because there isn't a single thing they are distributing that belongs to Nintendo. That is provided by the user when they supply the ROM that was downloaded from elsewhere.

When the Super Mario 64 PC port came out many places were trying to openly distribute it as a precompiled version, meaning they were distributing it with Nintendo's copyrighted assets included. This led to them being taken down by Nintendo Ninjas. Now, if you want it you can get it easily, but you have to build it yourself with a ROM you provide. If a theoretcal PC port of Minish Cap was to be released it likely would take this approach as well, meaning it would be protected.

An example of a PC port (although not based on a decompilation in this case) done badly in the legal sense was the Link's Awakening port, where the devs just uploaded an application which included all Nintendo's copyrighted assets (music, sprites etc) in it. If they had released it in a way where it extracted all these assets from a ROM it wouldn't have been taken down.

 

[gameboy64]

A properly executed port is different from other fan made projects for exactly the same reason projects like the Mario 64 PC port and Ship of Harkinian haven't been taken down. The decompilation was written with a clean room approach. The code was written to replicate the original code exactly, but the code itself is not a copy of Nintendo's code and they didn't look at Nintendo's source code for reference.

What the Super Mario 64 PC Port and Ship of Harkinian teams distribute are applications that take a ROM that they don't provide and pull assets such as textures, models and music from them (basically anything that is copyrighted) from the ROM itself and recompile them into a PC port. Nintendo hasn't been able to take the projects down because there isn't a single thing they are distributing that belongs to Nintendo. That is provided by the user when they supply the ROM that was downloaded from elsewhere.

When the Super Mario 64 PC port came out many places were trying to openly distribute it as a precompiled version, meaning they were distributing it with Nintendo's copyrighted assets included. This led to them being taken down by Nintendo Ninjas. Now, if you want it you can get it easily, but you have to build it yourself with a ROM you provide. If a theoretcal PC port of Minish Cap was to be released it likely would take this approach as well, meaning it would be protected.

An example of a PC port (although not based on a decompilation in this case) done badly in the legal sense was the Link's Awakening port, where the devs just uploaded an application which included all Nintendo's copyrighted assets (music, sprites etc) in it. If they had released it in a way where it extracted all these assets from a ROM it wouldn't have been taken down.

Hmmm a smart way to bypass Nintendo's incredibly strict copyright law. So you're saying that the coders can make "a clone version" of the game if user has to put ROMS into the emulator. As long as they don't just copy paste Nintendo models, soundtracks etc. it should be fine?

 

[Graxer]

Hmmm a smart way to bypass Nintendo's incredibly strict copyright law. So you're saying that the coders can make "a clone version" of the game if user has to put ROMS into the emulator. As long as they don't just copy paste Nintendo models, soundtracks etc. it should be fine?

Yes, a PC port in the sense I described is essentially a clone of the original, but what is being distributed doesn't contain anything owned by Nintendo.

 

[N10A]

Hmmm a smart way to bypass Nintendo's incredibly strict copyright law. So you're saying that the coders can make "a clone version" of the game if user has to put ROMS into the emulator. As long as they don't just copy paste Nintendo models, soundtracks etc. it should be fine?

What the developers are doing is distributing code that decompiles the original rom and recompiles it into a binary that can be run on a windows pc. That's perfectly legal as long as the reverse engineering that made this possible was done so in a "clean" way, in other words by not looking at any copyrighted or leaked code. This takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but is specifically protected under the law AFAIK.
A semantic point: Nintendo does not have a copyright law, nor do they enforce it. They can make DMCA claims, and then if whatever they make a claim against is in fact infringing under the DMCA it will usually be removed from wherever it is being hosted, as otherwise the host will be held legally liable. NIntendo is notorious for doing this, but they are far from the only company that sends DMCA notices after passionate fan projects.

 

[MegaGenesis]

Minish Cap was my first Zelda game when I was a kid. I had to use those text-only walkthroughs, but it was a lot of fun. Having this as a native PC port with widescreen support would be nice.

 

[Xdqwerty]

Decomps can't be taken down since they're 100% original code that generate the same matching binary once compiled back.

The copyrighted assets for the game are taken directly from a source ROM which the user has to provide, the decomp doesn't include any copyrighted assets, hence why Nintendo gets the L here.

What the creator of that one links awakening PC Port should have done

 

[mrcroket]

What the creator of that one links awakening PC Port should have done

The source code was public, so in theory someone could remove all the copyrighted content (sprites, music...) and make a software that extracted the necessary assets.