Enlarge / Scenes like this could soon grace your Windows PC. (credit: Kenix/Harbour Masters)
Back in November, the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team announced that it had completed its months-long project of decompiling The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time‘s ROM into fully human-readable C code. Now, a group building on that work says it is nearing the release of a fully moddable PC port of the game.
The Harbour Masters coding team (which shares some members with but is separate from the Zelda RET project) says its porting project is currently about 90 percent complete. The project will hopefully be ready for release as a public repository by late February, lead developer Kenix told Ars Technica. But while the massive project of decompiling the game provides a good base, getting from C code to a fully functional PC version of Nintendo’s 1998 classic isn’t simply a matter of telling a compiler to “build for PC.”
Actors and assets
When the Harbour Masters began to work in earnest on the PC port in December, Kenix said they “started by removing all of the actors [e.g., interactive objects like enemies, signposts, and bombable walls] and a lot of the game’s systems to simplify the build process and what needs to be changed to get it to load.” Those actors and systems were slowly added back once other problems with asset loading had been handled. “This gave us great results after only a few hours of work due to what we learned on the ‘minibuild,'” Kenix said.
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