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Zelda 64 (Ocarina of Time) has been fully decompiled, potentially opening the door for mods and ports

Winnie

Winnie

Member
Mar 12, 2020
2,628
It only needs review and merge the last pull request!

The community-led Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET) has been working for nearly two years to reverse engineer the N64 classic into parsable C code, which can be read by modern computers, similar to how fans were able to fully convert Super Mario 64 in 2019, after a two-year effort.

The achievement marks a huge milestone for the preservation of the classic Nintendo 64 game, and opens the door to modding, hacks and potentially even ports to other platforms such as PC (though it's worth stressing, none of this is within the remit of ZRET).
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ZRET told VGC: "It's been a wild ride. We've been able to create c code that, when compiled, reproduces the original game. We call this 'matching' decompilation.

"Last night, Fig, who is a notable community member as well as a project lead, matched the last-remaining function in the project. This means that all compiled code in the game has been turned into human-readable C code.

"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."

ZRET said that the final part of its progress is currently on a development branch.

Before the Ocarina of Time work is solidified, the project lead will need to submit his work via what's known as a "pull request", it told VGC. After that, the work needs to be thoroughly reviewed. Once that's done, it will merge this pull request, and the ZRET website's graph will show 100%.
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The group also plans to decompile other versions of Ocarina of Time in order to support the project. The core of ZRET's work was based on the Nintendo GameCube Master Quest version of the game, since it features some debug commands to help with its work.

"We have been working on decompiling the Master Quest Debug version of the game. However, Ocarina of Time has over a dozen other versions, which we plan to also decompile and support in the project," it said.
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ZRET's Ocarina of Time decomp is not a port and it's adamant that it will not be involved in any potential work to adapt the game's code to new platforms.

However, in the case of Super Mario 64's decompilation efforts, the project led to another group creating a fully functioning PC port of the N64 game within nine months, which is able to scale to any screen resolution and be easily modded by the community with new graphics and modern effects such as ray-tracing.

Eventually, fans even ported that game to many other platforms including Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch.

Outside of potential PC ports, the Zelda: Ocarina of Time decompilation project could have huge implications for hacks, as well as historical preservation and the discovery of new bugs which could be utilised by the speedrunning community.
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www.videogameschronicle.com

Zelda 64 has been fully decompiled, potentially opening the door for mods and ports | VGC

After nearly two years, a fan group fully reproduced the N64 classic in C code this week…
www.videogameschronicle.com www.videogameschronicle.com
 
riq

riq

Member
Feb 21, 2019
1,688
There are literally only good things to come from this. Congrats to everyone involved!
 
Zomba13

Zomba13

#1 Waluigi Fan! Current Status: Crying
Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,950
Nice! Look forward to the PC port and all the cool mods to come. Gimmie that RTX OoT.
 

Deleted member 44122

Guest
its only the master quest version so far though, right? i dont know how far the jump to regular oot would be
 
aisback

aisback

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,745
Oh shit here we go I've been waiting for this so patiently and can't wait to see what the community will do.
 
Berordn

Berordn

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 26, 2017
9,748
NoVA
bustacap said:
its only the master quest version so far though, right? i dont know how far the jump to regular oot would be
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it should just be a matter of building it with resources from the OG cart rather than the master quest one since they're otherwise the same game. master quest was just a newer version of the same codebase and had more bugs fixed iirc, and later versions of base OOT would use it as well

just like mario 64 you'll have to provide your own assets when the PC port inevitably surfaces, so realistically it's just a matter of what you give it to compile with
 
BriGuy

BriGuy

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
4,275
The PC port(s) of Mario 64 are fantastic, especially from an end-user perspective where you can recompile an updated version and have at it because the game is made up of small, discreet levels. I'm not sure how well Zelda will work; there's only so many times you can run through the Kokiri forest intro and the Deku tree. Whenever it does come out, I'm going to wait a good while for all the new models and graphical effects to be in place before going through it again myself.
 
Jasiek

Jasiek

Member
Dec 10, 2020
11
Somebody oddly worded the part "fully opened for lots cease and desist requests from Nintendo's lawyers".
If they decide they is but a MINIMAL impact of this on anything Zelda-related, or Nintendo related, they will start shooting without any mercy.
 
JudgmentJay

JudgmentJay

Member
Nov 14, 2017
5,229
Texas
trashbandit said:
I wouldn't assume this, it's entirely possible physics and other systems are tied to that 20 fps number, and changing that likely take a lot of work(work that people can actually do now, but still).
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With the source code available it would be relatively easy to fix this.

Anyway, looking forward to playing OoT at 4k/ultrawide 60+ fps. An unlocked camera mod like SM64 would also be nice.
 

Gyro Zeppeli

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,289
It would be cool to see fan games with new stories using Zelda 64 graphics. Nintendo C&D be damned. Shoot for the stars.
 
Alienhated

Alienhated

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,551
I was waiting for this sooo much!
We might finally get the og OoT running at 60 fps, upgraded models, raytracing, gameplay fixes...
Since Nintendo is never going to do that, we'll just make it ourselves.
 
AuthenticM

AuthenticM

Son Altesse Sérénissime
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
30,127
Not just mods, but someone could use this new engine to basically make a brand new game, right?
 
MinionZero

MinionZero

Member
Jan 14, 2018
310
The achievement marks a huge milestone for the preservation of the classic Nintendo 64 game...
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I don't think one of the highest reviewed Nintendo published games ever that has since been rereleased and remastered multiple times is a game that needs to worry about preservation. Not sure why the article needed to note that.

There are many other games that are much closer to being forgotten and lost. Those are the games we would really want preserved - especially if there is no way they will be rereleased. Just giving my two cents there.

Not just mods, but someone could use this new engine to basically make a brand new game, right?
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Has anyone made a new game from the Mario 64 decompile?
 
chiller

chiller

Member
Apr 23, 2021
2,777
Vespa

Vespa

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,850
Woops, bumped the old thread before seeing this! awesome news and well done the ZRET
 
Sax

Sax

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
2,329
I can't wait for the inevitable RTX branch. I really like how it looks in Mario 64.
 
Zero-ELEC

Zero-ELEC

The Wise Ones
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,567
México
Jasiek said:
Somebody oddly worded the part "fully opened for lots cease and desist requests from Nintendo's lawyers".
If they decide they is but a MINIMAL impact of this on anything Zelda-related, or Nintendo related, they will start shooting without any mercy.
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Nintendo has no grounds for cease and desist, the decomp project isn't using any assets or code. It's all reverse engineered.
 
Madao

Madao

One Winged Slayer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
4,697
Panama
for anyone hoping for 60 fps, you gotta remember that in the interviews for OoT 3D, the devs of that remaster said that getting the game to run at 30 fps required a lot of modifying of the code to remove framerate limiters that were in place in a lot of places because of how unstable framerates were on N64.

whoever decides to tackle a 60 fps mod is gonna have one hell of a task. it's possible but complicated.
 
chiller

chiller

Member
Apr 23, 2021
2,777
404LinkNotFound said:
This unironically is one of the things ive wanted Nintendo to do again in Zelda for so long lol. Idk if it was intended but i like how it implied how skilled Link had become in MM compared to OOT
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Hell yeah.

Madao said:
for anyone hoping for 60 fps, you gotta remember that in the interviews for OoT 3D, the devs of that remaster said that getting the game to run at 30 fps required a lot of modifying of the code to remove framerate limiters that were in place in a lot of places because of how unstable framerates were on N64.

whoever decides to tackle a 60 fps mod is gonna have one hell of a task. it's possible but complicated.
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Another reference point for this is the 60 FPS patch for the Super Mario 64 decompilation. It's around 2000 lines of added and removed code, just to interpolate 60 FPS visuals from the unchanged 30 FPS game logic. Games are so complicated.
 
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