Last year, coders managed to decompile the source code of both Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, allowing for native PC ports and various mods (thanks VGC). Fast forward one year, and code Ryan Dwyer has now managed to reverse-engineer the NTSC versions of Perfect Dark. As mentioned on the Perfect Dark decompilation status page, the NTSC, Japanese and PAL versions of the game are nearly all fully decompiled, but basically, the NTSC versions are 100% at this point. “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”, Dwyer writes. “The status page doesn’t show these as 100% because it counts matching functions only.” These decompiled versions of Perfect Dark are essentially legal due to them being reverse-engineered. Still, players wanting to play upcoming PC ports will need to own a legal copy of the N64 version of Perfect Dark in order to legally play a PC port. Great news for Perfect Dark fans for sure. Developed by Rare, Perfect Dark was released for the Nintendo 64 back in 2000. The game is considered the spiritual successor to Rare’s ever-popular Goldeneye 007. The game features a single-player mode consisting of 17 main missions in which the player assumes the role of Carrington Institute agent Joanna Dark as she attempts to stop a conspiracy by rival corporation dataDyne. It also features a range of multiplayer options, including a cooperative mode and traditional deathmatch settings. Technically, it is one of the most advanced games developed for the Nintendo 64, with an optional high-resolution graphics mode and Dolby Surround Sound. A Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak is required to access the game’s campaign and most of the multiplayer features.
