To operate this tool, you still need to disassemble the ROM up front and annotate it heavily before it can be recompiled. This tool is very nice, to be sure, but the hyperbole about anything close to one-click generation of standalone executables for an arbitrary ROM is getting out of hand.
This is really cool. Many of the foundational tools created for N64 decomp are finding their way into other system decomp packages. I recently came across <a href="https://decomp.me/" rel="nofollow">https://decomp.me/</a> which allows collaborative decompilarion for a bunch of systems with presets for their relevant SDKs and hardware. I’d imagine this happening several more systems in the coming years.
I saw this when it came out, and as someone that doesn't follow the ROM hacking scene, I'm wondering - why did this approach take so long to come up with? Translating the assembly instructions to C and then recompiling them seems like an obvious method to try early on, but I'm wondering if there was some other breakthrough that made this possible in a way it wasn't before?
Jamulator did this for NES way back in 2013 but nobody really seemed to care...<p><a href="https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html" rel="nofollow">https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html</a><p>There is also Winlator for running Windows programs on Android:<p><a href="https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator">https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator</a><p>Also is the youtube video linked in the article using an AI voice?
I wish all game executables would be OS agnostic, something similar to WebAssembly: GameAssembly. For example you can no longer play 32-bit games on new macOS version, neither 32-bit Windows games under Wine. It's almost impossible to find 64-bit .exe files so they can run under fine under Wine/Crossover.
I hope this eventually also works for Linux so that N64 games can be reliably played on very low end portable handhelds. N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate, but building them for the platform natively removes all performance problems.
One thing this could be cool for is games like Goldeneye, which is hard to play on PC because it expects that weird joystick input. It would be awesome to have a native Goldeneye port with normal mouse behaviour like other FPSes.
This is pretty neat; can someone tell me if this could lead to a proper working version of Conker on the MiSTer? E.g. could this be used to assist in a decompilation and then someone could make a fix?
What's the advantage over an emulator? This is after all, a form of an emulator - one where you translate ahead. This sort of thing has been done in the past with things like Bleem so it can be more performant but on a modern PC any good emulator is going to perform well.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem</a>!
There was speculation Nintendo did this for the Switch port of Super Mario Sunshine released in 2020. Someone is mentioning "NERD's recompilation tool" there : <a href="https://gbatemp.net/threads/who-said-switch-gamecube-emulation-was-impossible.626870/" rel="nofollow">https://gbatemp.net/threads/who-said-switch-gamecube-emulati...</a>
As an aside, the perfect dark decompile port is really nice to play on the steam deck. Not sure why, but the Linux version tends to freeze on the villa level. Switching to the windows version and using proton works great.<p><a href="https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark">https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark</a>
Super impressive walkthrough video in the article. It does a great job of explaining Majora's Mask. Although, it's probably glossing over a lot of the upfront technical challenges of using it to port games.
Isn't Nintendo hunting every one of their fans^H^H^H^H IP abusers with their black helicopters?<p>Why do people even bother when they know they'll get lawyers at their door in 3... 2... 1... ?