Zelda 64 has been fully decompiled, potentially opening the door for mods and ports - Video Games Chronicle

The community-led Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET) has been working for nearly two years to reverse engineer the N64 classic into parsable C code, which can be read by modern computers, similar to how fans were able to fully convert Super Mario 64 in 2019, after a two-year effort.

Before the Ocarina of Time work is solidified, the project lead will need to submit his work via what’s known as a “pull request”, it told VGC.

The group also plans to decompile other versions of Ocarina of Time in order to support the project.

The core of ZRET’s work was based on the Nintendo GameCube Master Quest version of the game, since it features some debug commands to help with its work.

ZRET’s Ocarina of Time decomp is not a port and it’s adamant that it will not be involved in any potential work to adapt the game’s code to new platforms.

However, in the case of Super Mario 64’s decompilation efforts, the project led to another group creating a fully functioning PC port of the N64 game within nine months, which is able to scale to any screen resolution and be easily modded by the community with new graphics and modern effects such as ray-tracing.

In news unrelated to the reverse engineering project, Earlier this year, a group of video game preservationists discovered and released a partial beta version of Ocarina of Time, allowing fans to recover a significant amount of new information about the pre-release version including new areas, redesigned items and other elements that never made it into the final build.