GoldenEye 007 Is Fully Decompiled After Five Years

Half a decade of work ends with GoldenEye 007's entire N64 binary rebuilt as readable source, opening the door to real ports and logic-level mods.

The best piece of unambiguous good news this week is 29 years old and runs on an N64.

After roughly half a decade of work, the GoldenEye 007 decompilation project led by KholdFuzion has reached 100 percent: the N64 shooter's entire binary is rebuilt as readable, recompilable source (Tom's Hardware, code mirrored on GitHub). That opens the door to things ROM hacking never did well: logic-level mods, engine fixes, and native ports. A PC port built on the decompiled code is reportedly already in testing, with no public release date yet (XDA's report).

The path from here is well worn. Super Mario 64 and Perfect Dark went through the same stages, and both ended up with native PC ports carrying modern controls, widescreen, and uncapped frame rates; GoldenEye's original single-stick control scheme is exactly the kind of thing a source port fixes first. The project publishes rebuilt code rather than a playable game, so nothing changes for players today. But GoldenEye has never officially appeared on PC, and a tested community port built from the game's own source is the closest it has ever come.

Sources