It's been quite a year for Nintendo games on the PC. There was the unofficial port of Ocarina of Time (opens in new tab), the complete reverse compilation of Link to the Past (opens in new tab), and now a coder named Ryan Dwyer has reverse engineered the original Nintendo 64 "Perfect Dark". Soon I won't feel the need to own a video game console at all.

The reverse compilation is available now on Dwyer's GitHub page (opens in new tab) and opens up all kinds of new possibilities for tweaking Perfect Dark on the PC. Now that the game has been reverse engineered, future tech wizards will be able to do anything from modding the game to creating unofficial PC ports.

Before you get the stares of Nintendo's lawyers, let me say that this reverse compiling and the hypothetical PC porting project that would result from it is technically legal. If you want to use the reverse-compiled version to play "Perfect Dark" on your PC, you will need to provide yourself with a ROM containing all of the game's copyrighted material. This is also why the Zelda project mentioned above was not killed by the DMCA.

Dwyer is working on decompiling the various versions of the game (open in new tab), but so far the only ones completed are the NTSC 1.0 and NTSC Final versions (the original release and later patch versions respectively). They are not yet "byte-matched," i.e., not "byte-for-byte" matched to the original game, so they are not shown as 100% complete on the tracker, but they are functionally complete. Still, it probably won't be long before they match the original perfectly if recompiled with the compiler used by the original development team.

There are many projects that aim to do the same for other Nintendo classics. At the time of this writing, 97.5% of projects (open in new tab) aim to reverse-compile "The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap", 91% aim to reverse-compile "Banjo-Kazooie" (open in new tab), and (most excitingly for me personally) "Majora's Mask" project (open in new tab) is nearly three-quarters of the way through. Nintendo's video games are being ported to the PC one after another, for what it's worth.