Whoever thought that a Perfect Dark port for PC could be a possibility? Not us anyway. But how is this possible we hear you ask, with the game being created for the Nintendo 64? From what we know, it seems as though the whole code for the Nintendo 64 game has now been reversed-engineered, or the technical name for it, decompiled.
There is a coder out there who goes by the name of Ryan Dwyer (which just seems to be his actual name and not some elaborate secret code name that we see so often) and he has decompiled both NTSC versions of Rare Studio’s first-person shooter. The versions consist of a 1.0 release at the launch, and then a re-release that will fix any issues, which are to be expected.
The success of this decompiling means that people can now create PC ports of the game, and as we all know, these are technically legal. But it means that you could get a Perfect Dark port for the PC and mod it however you like, now wouldn’t that be a sight? Modders will now be able to add all kinds of new features such as improving the resolution, frame rate, and texture quality of the old game, but keep all of the awesomeness that it consists of.
The talented coder has even created a status page for the ongoing project, with the NTSC 1.0 and NTSC Final versions of the game sitting at around 97.4 percent completion. Dwyer has insisted that he is basically at the 100 percent mark though, and the missing numbers are just a technicality. A status page like this just puts the whole thing into perspective and allows us basic gamers a chance to see how much effort actually goes into something like this.
Dwyer explained “The NTSC 1.0 and NTSC Final versions are fully decompiled, but a small handful of functions are not yet byte-matching, even though they are functionally the same. The status page doesn’t show these at 100% because it counts matching functions only.” So, in case you were about to call him out, then there’s his reasoning for the current incompletion.
If you’re thinking about what legal implications this could bring, then the answer is none. The project is completely legal because it’s essentially recreating the game’s code from scratch, without the need for copyrighted assets like music or any textures that were originally used. What it does mean though is that any ports that are birthed afterward will need to provide their own legally sourced ROM of the N64 original, with the assets from this being extracted and added to the code to create the required.
Perfect Dark is just the latest Nintendo 64 game to be decompiled, with an unofficial PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time being released online earlier in the year after its code was reverse engineering. The same thing happened for Super Mario 64 in 2019 as well, with the resulting mods making the game look fantastic.
