It’s not rare that you hear about a team (or even a single person) working to port old Nintendo games to PC via emulators, which often leads to DMCA strikes from the big N for illegal use of copyrighted materials. It is, however, a lot less common to hear about a team working to manually reverse engineer the source code of those old games and recreate them in a completely legal manner simply to see how they work.
That’s the main drive behind the efforts of the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET), the group working to painstakingly recreate Ocarina of Time‘s source code directly from the N64 and turn it into a much more user-friendly (and port friendly) computer language: C. For those of you who may have missed our initial article on this from January, let me give you a bit of background info.
This translation would create a base that would, with some additional coding and modifications, allow for a PC port with resolution scaling, altered textures, mods, cut content, and everything else that comes with a PC version of a game.
The initial goal of the project, however, was simply to figure out new methods for speedrunning the Zelda classic. A similar project was recently wrapped up for Super Mario 64, and a full PC port was created and uploaded to the internet for anyone curious to enjoy. The project gets around Nintendo’s notoriously aggressive copyright protections by avoiding directly copying the original game’s copyrighted materials, such as the code, graphical assets, and sound assets; the PC port instead uses fanmade assets alongside the from-the-ground-up rewritten C code. So while a PC port may not be the original intent for ZRET, it’s definitely still on the table as of this writing.
The project recently surpassed 65% debug progress, meaning that 65% of Ocarina‘s source code has been identified and rewritten in C thus far. The team is using the Master Quest version of the game due to it containing some handy debug options that help speed up the decompilation progress for the team. Who knows, maybe when this is all said and done we’ll have a fancy new PC version of Ocarina of Time and a new way to Jump Attack a wall with a Deku Stick while wearing the bunny hood at 6:32 PM on Death Mountain that will let us clip through the game and take us right to the end credits. Either way, I’m certainly excited to see where this all ends up!
