Perfect Dark's Decompilation Makes PC Ports and Mods Possible

More than 22 years after Rare's sci-fi FPS Perfect Dark was released for Nintendo 64, the game has been reverse-engineered, potentially allowing for native PC ports and various mods.

Programmer Ryan Dwyer managed to decompile two NTSC versions of Perfect Dark – the 1.0 version from launch and the later re-release that fixed up various bugs (via VGC).

These decompiled versions of the game are essentially legal as they were fully reverse-engineered (the game’s code was recreated from scratch) which means that modders are now able to add new features to the game or improve things like resolution, frame rate, and texture quality.

However, if players wish to play Perfect Dark PC ports, which may appear as a result of this decompilation, they'll have to own a legal copy of the N64 version of Perfect Dark in order to legally play them.

While the decompilation's status page reads that the NTSC 1.0 and NTSC Final versions are over 97% complete, Dwyer claims that they're basically 100% complete, and the remained percentage is essentially a technicality.

"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 wrote on the project's Gitlab page. "The status page doesn't show these as 100% because it counts matching functions only."

Perfect Dark joins a small list of fully decompiled Nintendo 64 games. Earlier this year, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was ported to PC after it was fully reverse-engineered. And prior to this, Super Mario 64 was decompiled and then ported to PC in 2019.

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