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.

Source

 

[Viri]

Can't wait to play OOT 64 on my PC, with 60fps, 3DS upscaled textures, with OOT 64 lighting!

 

[slaphappygamer]

Nintendo hands C&D to developer.
Nintendo has leak of new Zelda franchise release.
Nintendo, a decade later, releases new Zelda HD OOT game that runs in a packed emulator.
Zelda fans rejoice and HD 4K UHD upscale version is released.
Where have I heard this story?

 

[8BitWonder]

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

iirc Nintendo only ever went after some folks that were distributing binaries of the PC port. The PC port (and several forks) of sm64 is still up on github.
https://github.com/sm64-port/sm64-port

 

[tfocosta]

Well done! Great job!

Don't mean to complain, but IMO it would be great if something like this could be done with the 3DS port since it has better graphics than the N64's version.

But this is definitely something we should be thankful for.

 

[Emperor_Norton]

Pretty awesome! Hopefully this lets the OoT hacking scene really take off.

 

[ShadowOne333]

The differences between versions of OoT are pretty minimal at best.
They can easily be reproduced with a simple asset extraction, and then proper reinsertion in the appropriate locations.
(I know because I ported the entirety of changes from Master Quest over to a v1.0 ROM for the OoT Redux project).

So it's pretty safe to say that the rest of the differences can be done in like a month or so of work, but with multiple people it could surely be made in days.
Can't wait to see what's next in store, and the PC ports and improvement hacks that come out of it.

 

[the_randomizer]

Good, this ought to teach Nintendo for providing NSO with subpar emulators.

 

[MetoMeto]

can someone please reverse engeneer a metroid prime, since nintendo doesnt give a fuck about metroid? thank you.

 

[Ooggle]

Let's gooooooo finally!

 

[ut2k4master]

can someone please reverse engeneer a metroid prime, since nintendo doesnt give a fuck about metroid? thank you.

isnt there supposedly a remake/remaster coming? at least of the first one

 

[HarveyHouston]

Good stuff! Should've used GitLab, though.

 

[rufuszombot]

While i loved being able to play SM64 on 3DS and Vita, i was really hoping for a Series X/XB1 UWP port to come out and it never did. Here's hoping for one for OoT. That would be amazing.

 

[Augusto101]

We are being blessed by this masterpiece once again :3

 

[PoiRan]

Oh...my son was just about to play it on the Wii (VC + widescreen from Patcher64+ Tool), as that seems to be the best version so far (If anyone disagrees, tell me).

Maybe I should tell him to wait until it's released for the Switch

 

[E1ite007]

Great, now I wish that this leads to a Majora's Mask decompilation some time in the future.
That, and the BotW decompilation project are the ones I'm looking into now.

 

[ciaomao]

This, because I want N64 goldeneye with better control options, better frame rates during explosions, and hopefully it gets recompiled for the N64 with optimizations and fixes to run better emulated.

try the xbox360 version:

 

[godreborn]

bought nso expansion pack last month and so far, this has been the only game I've played. not really worth it for genesis if you have the genesis collection game for like $30, but I'm loving oot. I don't remember much about it, on the fire temple right now, on the first room, I plan to play it one of these mornings, but I keep oversleeping. I usually get up at like 5 or 6 a.m., but I've been getting up at like 9 the past couple days.

 

[FAST6191]

As much as I want to wade into the legal of not (short version is I see no way it can be for something like this, though for reasons I have never quite been able to fathom Nintendo, a famously litigious company, seems to leave it alone. This being anything but the mm wide gap afforded for clean room efforts, which this is most certainly not) debate I think I should leave it in favour of other things. I did have a quick scan of the code (naturally full dumps kept for the keep sharing the tapes scenario) and it did not seem as amenable to quick and easy PC port as Mario 64 ultimately ended up being but still well within reason, and plenty of scope to have some fun with things on a more native level or learning how the game works

can someone please reverse engeneer a metroid prime, since nintendo doesnt give a fuck about metroid? thank you.

That may be easier said than done if Prime was a C++ game (think GC had started to see C++ being a viable option for general use) rather than C, though I don't know what goes for that at this point. C++ decompilation is sort of thing but owing to the way it works it is way way way harder than plain C which has reached sort of practical levels (as evidenced by all this if nothing else) and is probably still quite a few years out such that you would be better off doing a recreation or waiting on I guess ultraleak if we are tweaking naming conventions.

 

[godreborn]

btw, off topic, but a friend of mine asked me if the oled switch's joycons could be used on other switches or if it could use older switches' docks. yes to both. I tried the joycons on my hackable switch, which I'll probably sell, and they worked without a problem. then, I tested the oled on my plugged in system, the animal crossing one, it also worked without issue. called Nintendo about the ac adapter, they said it's the same for all switches, so no issue using an old one on the oled.

 

[MarkDarkness]

I'd like to see this game with achievements now! Maybe using RetroAchievemnets...