The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been fully recreated in C code

[Shawn Knight]

Why it matters: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is considered by some to be among the greatest video games ever launched, and Nintendo seemingly agrees as they have ported it to every one of their major consoles since. Now thanks to the hard work and determination of a group of programmers, it’ll live on in a new form.

The Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET) recently matched the last-remaining function in the project. As the group told Video Games Chronicle, this means that all compiled code in the game has been converted into human-readable C code.

Notably, this is not a port of the game. Instead, the team recreated the entire game from scratch using modern coding languages. It also doesn’t utilize any of Nintendo’s original copyrighted assets or leaked content, thus making it a legal endeavor.

ZRET is in the process of putting the finishing touches on the project, at which time the status bar over on their website will read 100 percent.

Their work will be complete at that point, but as we saw with the decompilation of Super Mario 64 a few years back, the efforts are likely to lead to a fully functional PC port with support for mods.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launched on the Nintendo 64 in North America on November 23, 1998, or a little over two years after the console’s debut. It’s one of the few games from that era that I distinctly remember pre-ordering and being hyped for, and it certainly didn’t disappoint when it finally landed.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to take the game for a spin on the PC with ray tracing and high-res support.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/92409-legend-zelda-ocarina-time-has-fully-recreated-c.html

 

[Dimitriid]

Notably, this is not a port of the game. Instead, the team recreated the entire game from scratch using modern coding languages. It also doesn’t utilize any of Nintendo’s original copyrighted assets or leaked content, thus making it a legal endeavor.

That's hopeful thinking: It doesn't matter if Nintendo technically does not has a legal leg to stand on since we know how the legal system works: They only need to invest a lot of money to price the devs out of defending it in court.

Don't expect this to see the light of day I'm sure Nintendo will aggressively pursue DMCA takedown notices on entire data centers if they need to in order to get rid of it and litigate it away.

The real issue is so many man-hours and people getting so invested time and time again in working on Nintendo stuff when they know it won't actually see a widespread release, ever. Just code for some other games instead already.

 

[bviktor]

"It also doesn’t utilize any of Nintendo’s original copyrighted assets or leaked content, thus making it a legal endeavor."

Nah, there's still trademarks. Like 1st commenter, I'm also pretty sure this will get C&D'd in a heartbeat.

 

[Kotters]

Unless it was a clean room reverse engineering effort, it's not fully legal and free to use however you want. Decompilation is not clean room.

 

[theruck]

Or maybe we could play it on some cheap old hardware instead

 

[stewi0001]

What really sucks, is that fans want to express how they like or love something in their own ways. When it comes to the coders, they always get shafted with C&Ds. When it comes to the artists making pornographic pictures and videos of characters, they don't even bother...