GoldenEye 007's N64 code reaches 100% decompilation, PC port already in testing

A five-year reverse engineering project has fully decompiled GoldenEye 007's N64 code, opening the door to native PC ports and deeper mods.

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The N64 code for GoldenEye 007 has been fully decompiled, according to a progress tracker maintained by the project's lead, KholdFuzion. That means every line of the 1997 shooter's original machine code has now been reverse engineered and rewritten in a readable programming language, a process that took roughly five years, as Tom's Hardware reports. A PC port built from that work is already being play tested, though nobody involved has said when it might turn up publicly.

Decompilation is not the same as emulation, and it is worth being precise about the difference because the two get muddled a lot. An emulator like Project64 or Mupen64Plus tricks the original N64 game code into thinking it is still running on N64 hardware. A decompilation throws that hardware away entirely: the game's logic is rebuilt in C, so it can be compiled to run natively on Windows, Linux, macOS, or in principle anything with a compiler, without the overhead of simulating a 1996 console chipset. HotHardware explains that this is also what makes uncapped frame rates, widescreen support and heavier graphical mods far easier to bolt on than they ever were through emulation alone.

Why the GoldenEye code was worth five years of someone's life

GoldenEye 007 sold more than eight million cartridges and became the N64's third best selling game, according to Tom's Hardware's account of the project. It is credited with popularising console first-person shooters at a time when the genre, via Doom and Quake, belonged to PC, and its tactical touches, alarms, security cameras, silenced weapons, fed forward into Rare's own Perfect Dark and later into Halo and Call of Duty. Decompiling something that influential is partly an act of preservation and partly a technical flex: N64 games hide their logic in dense, hand-tuned assembly, and matching that behaviour instruction for instruction, rather than approximating it, is slow, unglamorous work.

What a native port can and cannot do

TweakTown notes that, unlike emulation, a decompiled port does not depend on proprietary hardware or leaked source code, which is why it sits on firmer legal ground. It still needs the original game's art and audio, though, so anyone running it will have to supply their own ROM or backup of the cartridge to unlock the copyrighted assets. That is the same model used by existing decompilation based ports of Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie, all cited by TweakTown as precedent. XDA, in its writeup, points out this is not GoldenEye's first brush with recompilation either: a cancelled Xbox 360 remaster of the game got its own fan made PC port a few months back, though that project relies on a leaked, unreleased build rather than a retail ROM, a considerably murkier source.

What is still unclear

Nobody has confirmed a release date for the tested PC port, and it is not clear yet how faithful or how heavily modified it will be, whether it keeps GoldenEye's fiddly N64 control scheme or replaces it with modern twin stick aiming, something XDA's Patrick O'Rourke says he is hoping for. HotHardware also flags speculation, credited to a commenter called ReCollect64, about a possible Dreamcast port given the recent uptick in N64 to Dreamcast conversions, but that is speculation rather than an announced project. For now the concrete result is the GitHub status page ticking over to 100 percent, and a testing build somewhere that nobody outside it has reviewed. The legitimate GoldenEye 007 remaster remains available through Nintendo Switch Online's Expansion Pack tier and on Xbox, for anyone who would rather not wait.

Sources

Image: TweakTown

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