ZRET (Zelda Reverse Engineering Team) has been working on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time project for almost two years.
They created readable C code from the Nintendo 64 classic, similar to Super Mario 64, which achieved this feat in 2019. What does the reverse engineering mean? In short, it means that hacks, modding, or even porting could result. Since no leaked data was used by ZRET (even though Nintendo was the victim of a serious leak…), as they recreated everything using modern programming languages and didn’t use any graphics or sound elements, the big N can’t take action against them for that.
“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, a notable community member and 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 exhilarating accomplishment. Dozens of people helped work on this project, and together we were able to achieve something amazing,” ZRET told VGC, adding that the final part of the process is now in the development branch.
Before reaching the finish line, the project manager still has to hand in his work, which a serious audit will follow. If it shows a satisfactory result, the percentage indicator on the ZRET website will jump up to 100. Of course, the team still has a lot of work to do after that, as documentation will need to be created, code and definitions must be renamed and reorganised, and asset-handling will need to be supported (the latter to make it easier to view and modify on PCs). The other versions of Ocarina of Time are also planned to be reverse-engineered. The team used the Nintendo GameCube Master Quest version as a starting point, as it contained debug commands to make the efforts more accessible. As there are more than a dozen other releases, more work will be done to expand the project.
According to ZRET, the project is not a port, and they will not be involved in any porting that may occur later. In addition to hacks, reverse engineering can also help historical preservation, and speedrunners may find the work helpful in discovering new bugs.
Source: VGC
