Someone's reverse-engineered Perfect Dark for N64 and made a PC port possible

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It's been quite a year for Nintendo games on PC. We've had an unofficial port of Ocarina of Time, a full decompilation of A Link to the Past, and now a coder called Ryan Dwyer has gone and reverse-engineered the original Nintendo 64 Perfect Dark. Pretty soon I won't feel the need to own any consoles at all.

The decompilation is available right now on Dwyer's GitHub page, and it opens up all sorts of new possibilities for tinkering with Perfect Dark on PC. Now that the game's been reverse-engineered, future tech wizards could do anything from modding the game, to creating entire unofficial PC ports.

Before you castigate me for drawing the baleful eye of Nintendo's lawyers, it should be noted that the decompilation—and a hypothetical PC port project resulting from it—would be technically legal (the best kind). If you wanted to use the decompilation to play Perfect Dark on PC, you'd need to provide your own ROM with all the game's copyrighted material on it. This is why the Zelda projects mentioned up top haven't been DMCA'd into oblivion, too.

Dwyer is working on decompiling a bunch of different versions of the game, but it's the NTSC 1.0 and NTSC Final versions—the original release and a later patched version respectively—that have been completed so far. They're not listed as 100% complete on the tracker because they aren't yet "byte-matching," meaning they don't match the original games "byte-for-byte," but they are functionally complete. Still, it probably won't be too long until they match the originals completely when recompiled with the compiler the original dev team used.

There are plenty of other projects aiming to do the same thing for other Nintendo classics. At time of writing, a project looking to decompile The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap says it's 97.5% done, another one for Banjo-Kazooie is 91% of the way there, and (most excitingly for me personally) an effort to reverse-engineer Majora's Mask is nearly three quarters of the way done. By hook or by crook, Nintendo games keep trickling onto PC.

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