AwesomeREA.org

Case study

Star Fox 64: a complete matching Nintendo 64 decompilation

Reconstructs C source for the US 1.1 (Rev A) Nintendo 64 release of Star Fox 64 that, compiled with the IDO compiler through a static recompilation, rebuilds a ROM with the published MD5; the README badge counts all 2,951 functions as matching. Code and assets are split from the user’s own ROM at build time, and the repository contains no assets or assembly. The separately curated Starship PC port compiles this C code, while Starfox 64: Recompiled takes headers and some functions from it for its patches.

Requirements and limitations

  • The reviewed master pin of 2026-09-28 is a clean-up commit after the July 2026 commits announcing 100% completion. README calls this a complete matching decompilation of the US 1.1 (Rev A) ROM, MD5 741a94eee093c4c8684e66b89f8685e8, and says it is not a PC port. Splat configurations and linker scripts also exist for US 1.0, Japanese and European releases, with checksum files for uncompressed Japanese and European 1.0 ROMs, but README does not document building them.
  • Building needs the user’s own US 1.1 Rev A ROM, placed in the project root as baserom.us.rev1.z64. README says the repository includes no assets or assembly code; make init decompresses the ROM, splits code, data and assets with splat, then builds. config.yml and assets/yaml also hold the Torch asset definitions that write starship.otr for the Starship port.
  • README documents Linux, natively or under WSL or a VM, with make, Git, build-essential, MIPS binutils, Python 3 with pip, libpng and the listed clang tools, or macOS with Homebrew’s coreutils, make, pkg-config and mips64-elf binutils; native Windows builds are unsupported. make toolchain downloads decompals’ ido-static-recomp build of the IDO compiler and builds the mio0 tool and Torch, while submodules add splat, asm-processor, asm-differ, m2c and Torch. A GCC build is available but defines NON_MATCHING.
  • With COMPARE=1 by default, the build checks the output against starfox64.us.rev1.md5, and README reads a mismatch as a bad base ROM or non-matching code. CI runs make init on the US ROM, fetched from a private repository through secrets, and a separate workflow checks formatting. These checks establish ROM identity for that release, not gameplay coverage; this collection ran nothing.
  • The repository carries CC0-1.0, which does not cover Nintendo’s game, the ROM or extracted assets; the IDO compiler and the submodules keep their own terms. The reviewed sources establish no AI or REA involvement.

About this entry

Type
Case study
Category
Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship
Independent reconstruction project
Targets
Game

Sources reviewed

The description was reviewed against primary sources. This does not establish runtime testing, security auditing or verified compatibility.

Primary sources

  1. README.md GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  2. Makefile GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  3. tools/Makefile GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  4. starfox64.us.rev1.md5 GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  5. config.yml GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  6. .gitmodules GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  7. .github/workflows/ci.yaml GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59
  8. LICENSE.md GitHub · sonicdcer/sf64 · Revision 4235c59