Fans are pretty much done decompiling binaries Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Zelda Reverse Engineering Team reports that they are almost done decompiling the binaries of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64. They are writing human-readable code, which is the prelude to mods, hacks and ports for the game. will be.

Video Games Chronicle reports this based on contact with the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team. The final pull request is ready to be included in the main branch after the developer community has done their inspection. After that, the entire source code of the game will be simulated, almost entirely in the C programming language. The version of the game they use is the debug version of OoT Master Quest PAL for the GameCube, according to their website.

Decompiling the binaries is a somewhat nuanced issue. Nintendo is strongly against fan projects such as ports of their games to other platforms. That is not what this development team does. All they do is mimic the source code by hand in C, which means they don’t infringe Nintendo’s copyright. However, the availability of this source code makes it very possible to port the game to Windows, for example.

The same thing happened in 2019 with Super Mario 64, which led to a PC port with support for widescreen displays, a higher quality model for Mario and support for things like higher frame rates, DX12 and even ray tracing. Nintendo is trying to get the ports off the internet.