Legend of Zelda fans have something new to grab their interest as a fan group known as ‘Zelda Reverse Engineering Team’ has apparently been able to successfully reverse-engineer 100% of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time code, which opens the door to mods, hacks, and ports of the game.
The group has stressed though that its own decompilation is “not a port” and has stated that it won’t be involved in any work to adapt the game’s code to new platforms. The group has also revealed that it is planning to decompile other builds of the game, like the Master Quest Debug version.
Regarding the legalities of the project:
“The kind of reverse engineering ZRET do is made legal because the fans involved did not use any leaked content. Instead, they painstakingly recreated the game from scratch using modern coding languages. The project also does not use any of Nintendo’s original copyrighted assets such as graphics or sound.”
More importantly than a possible PC version is that this decompilation project can be used to possibly assist with the historical preservation of Ocarina of Time.
“It’s been a wild ride. We’ve been able to create c code that, when compiled, reproduces the original game. We call this ‘matching’ decompilation.
“Last night, Fig, who is a notable community member as well as a project lead, matched the last-remaining function in the project. This means that all compiled code in the game has been turned into human-readable C code.
“We thought for a time that we may never be able to match every function completely, so this is an incredibly exciting accomplishment. Dozens of people helped work on this project, and together we were able to achieve something amazing.”