Ocarina of Time has been fully decompiled into human-readable code

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of voders staring in awe at the raw C code that generates Ocarina of Time. (credit: Nintendo)

A team of volunteer coders has reportedly completed its nearly two-year-long quest to fully decompile a version of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, turning the executable ROM back into human-readable (and editable) C code.

“We thought for a time that we may never be able to match every function completely, so this is an incredibly exciting accomplishment,” Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET) member Kenix wrote on the project’s Discord server Sunday. “Dozens of people helped work on this project, and together we were able to achieve something amazing.”

The final decompiled functions still need to be merged with the ZRET Github repository before the open source project is officially considered 100 percent complete, Kenix wrote. Once that submission is reviewed, though, the team should be able to run its tens of thousands of lines of C code through a compiler (alongside graphics and sound assets derived from a legitimate cartridge) to generate a bit-for-bit copy of the original Ocarina of Time ROM.