How an online community took back the Legend of Zelda - The Verge

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time PC port Ship of Harkinian is a community project based around reverse-engineering Nintendo’s classic game.

I don’t have a first memory of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time because It’s been in my life for as long as I can remember. Before I had the coordination to play the game myself, I would watch my older brothers play it for hours on end. When I could finally play through it myself, it felt like flying.

I chase that dopamine hit once every year or two by playing through Ocarina of Time, which normally requires dusting off my old GameCube and hoping the disk isn’t too scratched to read. But for the last several months, I haven’t been playing Ocarina of Time on a Nintendo console at all. Instead, I’ve been playing it on something called Ship of Harkinian: an unofficial port of Ocarina of Time for PC that a few short years ago would have been unimaginable.

For decades now, Nintendo has graciously indulged my — and other players’ — love of Ocarina of Time by re-releasing the much-celebrated game on every one of their home consoles since the Nintendo 64. In a way, these official ports have allowed the game to grow with me. But not all ports are created equal. Ocarina of Time’s most recent re-release as part of the Nintendo Switch Online collection was, in a word, abysmal.

Finding ways to play the game elsewhere has been dicey at best. Before Ship, running the game on a PC required using an emulator to mimic a Nintendo console’s hardware. Emulators are notoriously finicky, sometimes dramatically affecting gameplay. But building a native, non-emulated port would require access to Ocarina of Time’s source code — the human-readable code written by the developers who created it.

This poses a serious problem, because Ocarina of Time’s source code is kept strictly between God and Nintendo. For mere mortals, the only insight into the inner workings of Ocarina of Time is the near-unintelligible binary compiled from the source code and loaded onto the game’s cartridge. That’s where something called decompilation comes in.

https://www.theverge.com/23301428/legend-of-zelda-ship-of-harkinian

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