[COLUMN] I’m Obsessed With These Decompiled PC Ports of Nintendo 64 Classics | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

You haven’t really lived until you’ve stepped out into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field in 4K at 120fps, swung the camera around freely using the right analogue stick, and then proceeded to swap the color of Link’s tunic on the fly to the brightest shade of pink imaginable.

As one of Second Wind’s resident button boys, I’m admittedly a novice when it comes to mods and fan projects on PC. But seeing news bubble up this weekend of a Banjo-Kazooie unofficial PC port dropping onto the internet intrigued me enough to dip a toe into the shallow end of the world of decompiled and recompiled Nintendo 64 games.

Cut to a day later, and I’ve suddenly got a Steam Deck loaded with these ports of late-’90s classics like Super Mario 64, Star Fox 64, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, Quest 64, Majora’s Mask, and the aforementioned Banjo-Kazooie and Ocarina of Time. And as someone whose formative gaming years were shaped by many of those games, playing them in this format felt like literal alchemy in the best possible way.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the Nintendo 64. Not just the community-building four controller slots or revolutionary first-party projects that helped create the foundational language of 3D gaming. But I look fondly on the chunky visuals, terrible draw distances, and odd controls that stemmed from the growing pains of entering an entirely new dimension of play. The slow drip of new games, especially in those early few years, meant that by renting one game each weekend, I was able to play almost every single release for the console, which is unfathomable to think of for most modern platforms.

My nostalgic love for the console has only grown over the years. Just recently I bought the Analogue 3D console, and it’s been a blast jumping back into my collection of Nintendo 64 cartridges. That collection grew even larger a few months ago when I went to Japan and snagged a few dozen N64 carts from a handful of used game shops around Tokyo for a fraction of what they go for here in the US.

And maybe it’s because I’ve had the N64 on my brain lately that these decompilations struck such a chord with me. From my admittedly limited technological understanding, decompilations reverse engineer a game’s source code on an individual game basis, then use that to create a port that runs on hardware different than the original — in this case, running on your PC instead of a Nintendo 64 or an emulator. Once a game has been decompiled, that opens the floodgates for folks to be able to start modding away at them. 

That non-copy-righted code is totally legal, which means you need to supply your own ROM for it to pull the various assets from. But once you have both of those things, the setup was surprisingly simple, and I had the games up and running on both my PC and my Steam Deck in no time.

The one I’ve spent the most hours with so far is the Ship of Harkinan, which is the name of the aforementioned PC port of Ocarina of Time. It’s an impressive project filled with a bevy of options right off the bat. You have HD texture packs that make the world pop in modern resolutions. Built-in randomizers turn each and every chest into a surprise. Full control of the camera means you can zoom out to an obscene distance and experience Kokiri Forest from a point of view you’ve never seen before. And the absolute wealth of quality of life time savers allow you to do things like speed up the slow climbing and pushing animations.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve played through Ocarina of Time, but going through the opening few hours this weekend in the Ship of Harkinan made it feel fresh and new in a way I haven’t felt since Grezzo’s 3DS remake.  

While there’ve been a wealth of excellent indies to check out this month (stuff like Cassette Boy, Big Hops, Escape From Ever After, and TR-49 are all worth your time), the relative calm in the AAA space has made it a perfect opportunity to dabble in these fresh takes on ‘90s classics.

These decompilations are a staggering amount of work done by a passionate community who is truly just in it for the love of the game. That’s the kind of passion that I can absolutely get behind. I’m hoping that more Nintendo 64 hidden gems get this same decomp treatment down the road. Stuff like Mischief Makers, Space Station Silicon Valley, Rogue Squadron, Shadows of the Empire, Bomberman 64, Beetle Adventure Racing, and Snowboard Kids. Hell, I’d be curious to see what folks could do with a historic dud like Superman 64. But not Glover. Leave that five-fingered pervert to rot.

And while Nintendo 64 seems to be the platform that many of these decomps are coming from, I’m keeping my eye on a few others, including a Legend of Dragoon project called Severed Chains that looks extremely promising.

As a devotee of handhelds, I view my Retroid Pocket as a time machine crammed with the libraries of consoles from the NES up through the GameCube/PS2 generation. But now that my Steam Deck is filled with a handful of these Nintendo 64 decompilations, Valve’s handheld is beginning to feel like portal into an alternate dimension where there were no frame rate limitations, where the N64 controller had a second analogue stick, and where Banjo and Kazooie were able to wander around Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule without being bothered. What a time to be alive.