In recent times, we’ve had a lot of interesting games decompiled. These include Mario Kart 64, Mario Party 4 and Sonic the Fighters among others, with all manner of crazy titles likely to follow in the coming months.
But now we’ve got something a bit strange even by decomp standards. Why? Because while fans have decompiled another piece of GameCube software, it’s not a game this time around.
No, it’s an emulator. Namely, the one used to play Ocarina of Time on the Wind Waker bonus disc. Here’s the GitHub repo with all the changes and 100% code coverage:
It’s an interesting project for sure. You get to understand how Nintendo adapted N64 games to run on GameCube hardware, there’s a bit of novelty in seeing the emulator for Master Quest understood at this level and it’s certainly attention grabbing to some degree…
Yet it still raises a few questions too. That being, what exactly would this mean for the community going forward?
Because other decomps tend to be the building blocks for PC ports, mods and other content for much loved games. They’re why titles like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had such incredible modding scenes right now, and why others have so much potential.
This emulator probably won’t have quite the same effect. Ocarina of Time itself has already been decompiled, so there’s no real benefit gained from porting it to PC. Proper community made emulators like Mupen64 have already been ported to the GameCube, with more accurate emulation and features.
Plus, there’s not really much you can build off of here. The emulator works about as well as you’d expect it to for the single game it’s made to support, and it just takes normal N64 ROMs for input. So, if you have the ability to run homebrew or anything, you can already try and get this emulator to play all your games and hacks. They probably won’t work well, but it is technically doable.
Ah well, it’s neat to see nonetheless, and adds another ‘game’ to the decomp pile. So, what are your thoughts on it? Are you interested in seeing the GameCube’s limited N64 emulator modified and built on? What future projects do you think this decomp could potentially lead to?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or on our Discord server today!
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