The community project Zelda 64 Reverse Engineering has successfully reverse engineered Ocarina of Time into parsable C code. If that sounds like nonsense to you, it basically means the game is now remade in a modern, open-source coding language.
The team has been working on the project for the last two years, and is huge for both preservation efforts and the modding community. In order to carry out the project, the group completely remade the game using modern coding languages. And it also doesn’t contain any of Nintendo’s copyrighted assets like graphics or sound.
In 2019, another group of fans were able to do the same for Super Mario 64. This massively opened up the possibilities for the game, resulting in a PC port of it that allows for easy modding and scalable resolutions.
Huzzah
ZRET spoke with VGC on the success of having reverse engineered Ocarina of Time. “We thought for a time that we may never be able to match every function completely, so this is an incredibly exciting accomplishment,” says ZRET. “Dozens of people helped work on this project, and together we were able to achieve something amazing.”
The project isn’t quite finished yet though. As ZRET told VGC the project lead needs to submit his work via a, “pull request”. Then it needs to be reviewed, and once that is done it will be ready to go. Having now reverse engineered Ocarina of Time, the group plans to decompile other versions of the game. This includes versions like the GameCube’s Master Quest.
Maybe we’ll see the same happen to Majora’s Mask in the future? After all, it’s available to play on modern systems via the Switch Online Expansion Pack, though it’s also not very good on there.
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Featured Image Credit: Nintendo