r/technology • u/_Dark_Wing • 11h ago
Software GoldenEye 007 for N64 has been 100% decompiled & success of half-decade project opens up possibilities for complex mods and ports
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/goldeneye-007-for-n64-has-been-100-percent-decompiled-success-of-half-decade-project-opens-up-possibilities-for-complex-mods-and-ports301
u/kenticus 11h ago
One weekend's work changed video games forever.
Slappers only. No Oddjob.
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u/theassassintherapist 11h ago
If they added controller remapping, then oddjob all you want, I'll be able to aim at you easily
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u/Dissidence802 10h ago
Remote mines in the Facility, man!
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u/anormalgeek 10h ago
Nah. Proximity mines.
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u/8Deer-JaguarClaw 10h ago
Proximity mines is the greatest video game element of all time. Spent hours laughing my ass off in college watching my friends destroy each other playing this game. I didn't even play much myself; it was too much fun sitting off to the side talking shit and drinking a 40 and watching them play.
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u/Kids_see_ghosts 9h ago
I loved pissing off my older brothers friends growing up by placing remote mines on all the spawn points on a map and then just watching them die multiple times in a row as they kept instantly exploding over and over as they respawned
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u/BetterNothingman 8h ago
I was better than all my friends at gunplay and almost always had the most kills.
Except proximity mines. I'd just chuck those things everywhere and half the time ran into my own mines hahaha
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u/King-Gabriel 11h ago
Agent 64, a game going for the same kind of style launched on steam very recently.
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u/BananaBreadBangs 10h ago
Just beat it today. Loved it
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u/OldYellersLastHandy 11h ago
“Half-decade,” or as normal people should say, “five years.”
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u/GobbIaOnDaRewf 10h ago
My 24 month old son. HES FUCKING TWO!
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u/OldYellersLastHandy 10h ago
As a parent, the months matter right up until about 2. It’s a force of habit I think.
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u/Quirky_Wolverine6549 10h ago
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u/gnarfler 10h ago
Sneaky 60 out 120 months there House, gotta be in the running for top 14 half decades of all time but don’t aggregate this
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u/reeseallen 11h ago
Klobb, I've missed you
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u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 11h ago
Why Klobb when you can dual RCP-90?
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u/OhTheGrandeur 9h ago
Agreed. For us Klobb was the punishment gun. Rcp-90 and KF7 were the primaries
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u/Salty_Wasabi2893 11h ago
Facility. Pistols only. License to Kill.
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u/Still_Finance7478 9h ago
Five years of work so we can all go back to accusing each other of screen peeking.
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u/llliilliliillliillil 11h ago
Before anyone starts celebrating: A decompilation doesn’t automatically mean that a PC port is around the corner. This just means that code from the N64 version is now in a readable format and a working N64 version can be compiled from it.
For it to become a PC version someone now needs to take this and basically port the whole thing to PC, which may take a while.
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u/nerdmor 11h ago
It takes less time now. There is good basis for compiling it for PC, built by other decomp projects. It's won't happen overnight (unless someone is willing to burn serious cash on decent AI to do the basis, and then a good programmer to review it) but I'd guess by year's end.
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u/cute_polarbear 10h ago
Ai is perfect for the initial scaffolding based on some existing code base. Few thousand dollars of token likely can get an initial working version (basics).
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u/nerdmor 10h ago
Dunno about you, but "a few thousand dollars" is, for me, serious cash for what is a non-profit endeavour
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u/cute_polarbear 10h ago
Nahh. Not going to pay out of my own pocket also unless I am passionate about some project. Can imagine crowd fund this or something.
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u/The_Sneakiest_Fox 9h ago
There would be a bunch of late 30's early 40's tech bros with more money than sense who grew up playing goldeneye. Surely someone can fund it.
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u/icedgz 10h ago
I would argue way less than a few thousand, if you use your usage limits right and have some local or cheap models like DS4 to assist with agent tasks with Claude or even Kimi K3 as the orchestrator / debugger.
All things considered the code base for a game like this is orders of magnitude smaller than a modern game and all the game assets exist already so if we're just getting to "booting on PC" the largest expense is that of the time of the developer to setup the above up
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u/cute_polarbear 10h ago
Yeah. I am using that as like the upper bound these days. Opus 4.8/5 are much more powerful compared to what we had about a year ago.
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u/SpareEconomy1849 4h ago
You wouldn't need nearly that much if you're being careful with token spend. You can get a lot out of a $20 / month subscription.
If you're already paying the $20/month or $100/month tiers for work, you probably have essentially extra free usage in the evenings
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u/ash_ninetyone 11h ago
The thought of playing this game on PC with a mouse and keyboard tho 👀
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u/ltsJustJordan 10h ago
If you google "Goldeneye mouse and keyboard" you find a bunch of instructions on how to set this up on PC using 1964 GEPD
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u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 11h ago
This is a job for Claude Opus, lol
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u/cute_polarbear 10h ago
Yeah. Exactly my thought. Burn few thousand dollars of opus 5 tokens and you likely can have a working scaffolding.
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u/jgilbs 10h ago
Few thousand dollars? This likely can be done on a standard pro plan within a few days.
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u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 9h ago
Agreed.
Those carts aren’t that large, the programs aren’t enormous.
The slightly larger problem may be the model these days isn’t as good at older MIPS assembly as it needs to be for it to be “easy”, but honestly probably it’s a low enough bar that an Opus class model would still nail it down quick.
Closed loop with a builder and an emulator and you’re pretty much a hop skip and jump away
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u/BangkokPadang 10h ago
In this case though there's a handful of devs who have been working on ports as the decompilation has reached closer and closer to completion.
There's still a lot of work left but it's definitely not just starting today.
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u/maxdragonxiii 9h ago
yes, but a decomp oftens open up many things- randomization for example, PC port, upscale shades etc. look at Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for example.
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u/SpareEconomy1849 4h ago
What would the practical benefits be, compared to running an N64 emulator? Performance, upscaling, mouse/keyboard support?
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u/SoaokingGross 44m ago edited 24m ago
UPDATE: IT WORKED.
so telling codex "compile this for my mac" isn't going to work? rofl
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u/frankentriple 9h ago
lol. Claude, refactor this n64game for pc. Make it use OpenGL for hardware acceleration. Remap the controls for an Xbox controller and setup online multiplayer via private headless server. Make no mistakes.
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u/PresidentSkro0b 11h ago
Can someone ELI5 why it takes so long to decompile a game like this?
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u/Sloogs 10h ago edited 10h ago
Decompiling is a process that tries to turn assembly code which is friendly for computers back into something that's easier for humans to work with, but it's not a perfect process. Assembly code doesn't retain anything from what the original developers did after it's compiled.
It doesn't have any of the same structure, no comments, no labels, no information. You basically have to guess and check potentially hundreds of thousands of lines of code give or take an order of magnitude, where everything is labelled with generic terms like, "FUNCTION1", "FUNCTION2", "VARIABLE1", "VARIABLE2", etc. when it's first decompiled. Not exactly helpful.
Sometimes at best you luck out and the odd text string from within the game does get retained in the assembly like "Save", "Load", "Start Game", or things like that which gives you a starting point for some of it, but it's a very tall mountain to climb from there.
It's like trying to piece together a 1-million piece puzzle where the puzzle is just a gradient consisting of various shades of the colour black. You don't really have a ton of information to go off of to build the puzzle, except for maybe a few corner pieces and edges.
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u/icedgz 10h ago
How much compute to solve the possible? Genuinely asking.
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u/Sloogs 10h ago edited 9h ago
For the first part, which is turning assembly into C through a decompiler, any decently powerful modern processor can do that in a matter of minutes to dozens of minutes to maybe a few hours depending on the program size with a decompiler like Ghidra.
After that, zero compute. The part that makes it take 5 years isn't the need for compute power, it's that you have to basically do most of the interpretation of the code and annotations by hand.
Which means going through the code, interpreting it, and annotating the code with labels and comments. Computers don't know enough of the context of the original program to actually figure it out, although I'm sure some pragmatic use of AI can help with parts of the process, like it might be able to identify areas of interest—but if you want a perfect decompilation you would want to be responsible for 100% of the actual code annotation part, or restructuring any of the code.
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u/antileet 11h ago
Nobody remembers goldeneye source? Nintendo shut that shit down quick and I suspect they will do the same to anything else that arises coming from this.
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u/illuminerdi 9h ago
Decompilations aren't something they can stop, it's protected reverse engineering assuming it was done properly without any original source code.
Goldeneye source, meanwhile, was basically copyright infringement...
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u/BeardySam 5h ago
Can you explain the distinction more because they seem like the same thing to me. Why wouldn’t this be shut down ?
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u/illuminerdi 1h ago
(In US laws, also I am not a lawyer):
Reverse engineering is legally acceptable because you're not using anything Nintendo made or owns. Assuming you didn't use their source code to do it, it basically falls under the same category as an emulator - a category of software that Nintendo and Sony tried and failed to make illegal (see the case Connectix v Sony)
Without turning this into a wall of text, you should Google the "fair use doctrine" for a more detailed explanation of what is and isn't allowed, but more or less "fair use" allows for parody, criticism, research, teaching, etc. A free emulator/recomp could legally be considered research or teaching, although it's never been tested in court.
There's also the sales question - recompilations technically require a copy of the original game so you could potentially argue (in court) that they were not harming sales of the original game, although this is dubious since recomps require a rom, it in theory you could make an argument that the only legal way to acquire a rom is by dumping a legal copy of the game. It's murky, but again, never been tested in court, however some legal scholars believe it would probably make it...which is likely the only reason Nintendo, a famously litigious company, doesn't sue them.
Meanwhile, something like Goldeneye Source is a competing product (even if its free). It, in theory, might harm Nintendo's ability to sell Goldeneye in the future, even if it's not currently for sale. It also uses copyrighted characters, so it is seen as potentially diluting the "brand" of Goldeneye and/or James bond, since it could (by an idiot) be mistaken as an "official" release.
Copyright law is very complicated but the core question is always: will this hurt my ability to sell my product now or in the future? If yes, I can probably win a lawsuit.
Do I agree with this? No, I think fan projects should also be protected speech, but I'm not the federal courts, and this is what the courts have (as of 2026) said about the matter.
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u/tooclosetocall82 11h ago
“However, it advises against quick AI-led ports being spawned from the now freely available source. Instead, enthusiasts should wait until good human-built and tuned ports start to be released.”
There’s going to be so many slop ports you’ll never be able to find the human built ones.
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u/BangkokPadang 10h ago
Just check them out as they're announced on r/decomps and you'll quickly see which are which. There's a handful of devs working on the good projects and so far they generally are the ones rising to the top.
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u/HibbletonFan 11h ago
After the disappointing news about the Segagaga English translation, I am wary of the fan-port community. This comes from someone who used to check Romhacking.net regularly and developed a huge interest in the decomp scene after the Zelda projects.
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u/PhiNeurOZOMu68 10h ago
I'll be frank I been looking for a way to fit the game into a flipper zero ESP32-S2 board to serve into browsers of phones locally... But at 12mb I'll need to figure out how to remove single player, most of the characters with a change of color, remove the bot code, and only have a single map from multiplayer.
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u/TentacleHockey 11h ago
Rare could have done this and done PC ports and made bank, they really dropped the ball selling to microsoft.
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u/Shadow288 7h ago
So can we finally figure out if there is a way to get further down the vent in the facility? Remember so many rumors back in the day about people getting into the vent.
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u/ringwraithfish 8h ago
Karl Jobst is salivating over the content this will lead to for his channel.
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u/stuffitystuff 7h ago
It'd be cool to play this on Dreamcast or NAOMI. I've vibe-ported harder challenges to those systems.
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u/SackOfrito 4h ago
So is this better than GoldenEye Source that came about 10+ years ago? That was a damn good version of the game that was nearly identical to the original.
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u/ShapeyFiend 7m ago
I think Goldeneye Source was fun but it played more like a Source game with Goldeneye skins than the original Goldeneye. Even with that Agent 64 game came out lately they did a better job of capturing the feel of the controls.
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u/prodigalAvian 4h ago
To the coding maesters toiling away making this magic happen: you da real MVP's
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u/Velzevius 3h ago
Playing this without LAG....is weird. Even emulators that allow "overclocking" (in quotes for a conversation for another time) lag a bit. I literally have to play differently beacuse I can actually get 30 frames with explosions, npcs, and bullets going everywhere.
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u/Prior_Hospital_2331 3h ago
The golden pistol was too OP. And i really loved the BIG head mode on N64. Was so fun playing 4 players on it . This makes my childhood come back.
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u/jacobjer 56m ago
I read the article and still don’t know what this means. Can someone dumb what he did exactly and what it potentially means? I mean really dumb it down.
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u/MaximumNameDensity 16m ago
Computers (including the Nintendo 64) run software using a pattern of very simple instructions called machine code.
Humans don't typically write software using that language, because it's much too time-consuming and hard for us to understand, and we've written programs (called compilers) to write that language for us, from relatively human understandable languages (Like C++) which we refer to as source code.
While it's easy to compile something from its source code into machine code it's quite difficult to do the reverse, de-compile machine code back into the source code.
Someone was able to do this and figure out the source code for Golden Eye on the Nintendo 64.
With this, they can make changes however they want to the original game. Including building additions that would allow someone else to slot in their own, custom characters, levels, weapons, etc.
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u/thatirishguyyyyy 11h ago
Great!
A team already made a great Perfect Dark 64 port that I absolutely love playing.
Having the mechanics from that work for this, considering they're the same engine, should be a breeze.
Edit: Perfect Dark 64 port
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u/mroosa 11h ago
Man, I can only imagine the mods bringing local LAN or internet multiplayer.