Nice. Haven't played this since the N64. It was one of the best games of the system, and I think OB64 in particular gets overlooked next to Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics due to the lack of Matsuno's involvement. But it's head and shoulders better than the original Ogre Battle, and can stand toe-to-toe with Matsuno's best.
I'd love to play it again some day, since my first playthrough was without a guide and despite 60+ hours logged into the game, I ended up getting the worst ending thanks to the completely unexplained mechanic that your ending was determined by how many forts you "liberate" vs "conquer" (basically was your character of a higher or lower alignment than the fort when you captured it).
Next time, try a walkthrough from GameFAQs. Printed that bad boy out at school and played into the wee hours when I was a teen. Still my absolute favorite RPG, but I needed all to get all the secrets, all the birthday items, all the unique characters that only existed in so-and-so town after the campaign ended, etc. To this day, all I'd want in a modern RPG is something like Ogre Battle 64, and instead all I get is the SNES/PS1 version (my current copy is the latter, since the SNES yielded me a very nice aftermarket price about a decade ago), which is great, but definitely rougher in comparison.
It's so frustrating that Unicorn Overlord doesn't have a PC port. Unfortunately, the devs seem to be anti-PC, despite lots of calls for it, from both fans and the publisher.
Same as the other poster, I can't play it, as I have no Playstation newer than a PS2. Maybe one day it'll get ported or someone else will create something for the PC.
The % is estimated based on the number of functions that still need to be recompiled. It is already possible to play and even create mods! As other recomp projects, you need to provide your own ROM.
It's sad that we even have to think about this. Ogre Battle 64 is 27 years old now. Under the law that preceded the Copyright Act of 1976, it would be entering the public domain right about now.
It's absurd how long we've made copyright terms, and it's really endangering preservation.
True I just wish they didn't have to skulk in the dark for what is essentially a public service. I also think some projects aren't so lucky.
We probably have a pretty brief window where projects like this can even be done where there's people alive who worked on the original systems. It would be nice if these were encouraged rather than being in some gray area.
More infringing than emulators. De/recompilation projects are pretty clearly 'derivative works' of the original copyrighted program code, even if they require the original ROM in order to extract other assets necessary to compile a fully playable artifact.
The closer analogy would be fan-translation patches, which are also pretty clearly copyright-infringing derivative works though generally tolerated by rights holders.
Companies often encourage (or at least turn a blind eye to) creative derivative works from fan communities, especially if they're non-commercial and aren't cutting into the market share of their own official products enough for them to take notice.
This is a recomp project, not a decomp project; the original binary is supplied by the user, mechanically translated into source code at an architecture level (rather than a human-readable level), and patched. It’s AOT dynamic recompilation and the original IP isn’t distributed.
I do agree that decompilation projects are obviously not transformative (the only fair use feet they really have to stand on are purpose and market effect), but recomp projects are a little more interesting and might live on much less shaky footing.
Thank you for explaining this. I had the exact same misunderstanding as the parent poster, and was only corrected (and educated) by reading your comment.
A hypothetical relating to the legal aspects: Since this was mostly done by an LLM, the legal considerations would become incredibly interesting in cases where the original code (source or binary) was illegally leaked. What happens if the LLM saw the leaked code in its training material?
(My non-lawyer brain thinks it's completely obvious that in that case you have a derived work, but apparently the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived, so what the hell do I know…)
> the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived
I think it's more of a "the constitution is not a suicide pact" approach to GPL: while the GPL is obviously violated by its inclusion in the training corpus, we have two options:
- demand the destruction of LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works and the training of new ones
- accept that LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works are more important to humanity than the rights of the authors
Well if it's the second, then surely I can train my LLM using the frontier labs' models too? And have my LLM "interpret and reproduce" GTA 6?
How is any of this going to work out if we just decide to throw out copyright like this?
(I am well aware that it is not currently technically feasible to copyright-wash GTA 6. Replace that game with a best-selling novel or whatever.)
And, if we do decide that copyright is just gone, can we please make laws to that effect? Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and going "oh well, this new thing is useful, so we'll let it slide, but don't you dare to pirate movies, because reasons!"
I see that now… why did they check it in? One of the whole points of this approach is that that assembler should be trivial to re-derive by the end user since it’s just the original program listing. Some of the Xbox 360 recomp projects like https://github.com/mchughalex/skate3recomp offer a better example of how this pattern can be achieved without distributing the binary at any intermediate level.
It's basically the same as emulation as long as the recompiled code doesn't get distributed (which this project doesn't do AFAIK). Functionally the only difference between a "recomp" and traditional console emulation is that the assembly code that the CPU runs is translated to C then compiled to native code, rather than being interpreted or JIT compiled at runtime. Traditionally recompilation was mainly used when porting games to platforms where the emulation overhead would have been too much, like if you were making a GBA port of a Sega Genesis game. With these enhanced ports, I guess the idea is that if you're making a game specific "emulator" anyway, you might as well recompile the code and get rid of the overhead of interpretation.
Note that this isn't the same as a "decomp" where the goal is to make readable source code that resembles something that the original developers would have worked with. A "recomp" simply translates the assembly instructions to C. You end up with "assembly code but in C" rather than idiomatic C code.
I'm not aware of legal trouble involving the the Zelda 64 recomp project, which would have a much higher chance of attracting the attention of big N (especially now that a new version of OoT is coming out).
At least in the way that I see it, a recomp is like building your own turntable to play your vinyl records, after stydying their grooves and infering how they would sound (so I guess that it would be less gray than an emulator).
IIRC, EU have some laws protecting "interoperability", i.e. making a program work on other platforms. I suspect decompiling is considered as "interoperability".
No one can say anything, no game rom is ever bundled in the official releases of these recomps. We always have to provide the roms. Where from, it's another story.
So I've no clue how all this recompiling works, but why does the result of this process still need hardware that is at least two decades newer in order to run?
The hardware support is purely a function of the decision of this specific project to only target newer graphics APIs. The Ocarina of Time decomp for example supports older PC hardware through OpenGL and has also been ported to Dreamcast.
There's roughly ~350 games. It took me about two weeks in this project (and it's a complex game, with lots of different screens), but I had to babysit the AI a lot because it would get stuck multiple times. With the cambrian explosion of recomps, we can expect that in the next couple of years.
Are there any similar projects that do recompilation for old DOS games? I am mainly interested in games written in Borland Turbo C, as I am trying to work out how one of them works. Some resources like tutorials would be great too.
Never heard of this game. Looking it up on Wikipedia it seems to have decent but not outstanding reviews. Does it have some kind of cult following? Or this notable for some other reason?
It was an unusual game in many aspects. Few copies were created, as the publisher had some issues. Its prerendered graphics aged very well. It has a small fan base. I recall that its gamefaqs guide had something like 60+ pages, given the amount of content and secrets that it has. In a console with few RPGs as the 64, it was an oasis.
The game has big attention for detail in both sprites and text. For example, at some point it unlocks a screen that lists all characters in a graph chart, with colored edges as their relation type - and it updates multiple times as the game progresses.
The strategy part of the franchise is mostly forgotten nowadays, there was only a recent remake for "let us cling together"(which is awesome as well, but it's in the tactics genre).
> The game received "favorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.[26] In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of 33 out of 40.[29] Nintendo Power gave it a favorable review while the game was still in development.[37] Vicious Sid of GamePro said, "Beneath Ogre Battle 64's intimidating interface and plodding pace lies a wealth of strategy: If you choose to enlist, be sure to pack plenty of patience."[40][d]
> The game won the award for "Best Strategy Game" at GameSpot's Best and Worst of 2000 Awards,[41] and was nominated for the "Best Game No One Played" award, which went to Samba de Amigo. The staff noted that the game's sales had "fallen prey to [its] console of origin, the N64."[42] The game was also nominated for the "Best Console Strategy Game" and "Gamers' Choice: N64" awards at The Electric Playground's Blister Awards 2000, both of which went to Front Mission 3 and Perfect Dark, respectively.[43][44]
> It was rated the 111th best game made on a Nintendo System in Nintendo Power's Top 200 Games list.[45] Reviewing the Virtual Console re-release, IGN said that it "was (and still is) lordly indeed".[34]
> In 2023, Time Extension included the game on their "Best Nintendo 64 Games of All Time" list.[46]
Sounds like it was received well even if it didn't sell well
The N64 SDK (Libultra) was leaked a while ago and is all proprietary, owned by Nintendo. Portal 64 was issued a DMCA by Valve partly on account of them not wanting to get on the bad side of Nintendo because it used Libultra.
It's not only possible but I would argue highly likely that any LLM has absorbed that proprietary code into its training data making effectively any decomp not a clean room effort if they incorporate assistance from LLMs or coding agents into their tooling. If Nintendo wanted to be particularly onerous they could easily claim that their codebase makes use of proprietary tooling/knowledge and there would be zero recourse for the devs.
Nice. Haven't played this since the N64. It was one of the best games of the system, and I think OB64 in particular gets overlooked next to Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics due to the lack of Matsuno's involvement. But it's head and shoulders better than the original Ogre Battle, and can stand toe-to-toe with Matsuno's best.
I'd love to play it again some day, since my first playthrough was without a guide and despite 60+ hours logged into the game, I ended up getting the worst ending thanks to the completely unexplained mechanic that your ending was determined by how many forts you "liberate" vs "conquer" (basically was your character of a higher or lower alignment than the fort when you captured it).
Next time, try a walkthrough from GameFAQs. Printed that bad boy out at school and played into the wee hours when I was a teen. Still my absolute favorite RPG, but I needed all to get all the secrets, all the birthday items, all the unique characters that only existed in so-and-so town after the campaign ended, etc. To this day, all I'd want in a modern RPG is something like Ogre Battle 64, and instead all I get is the SNES/PS1 version (my current copy is the latter, since the SNES yielded me a very nice aftermarket price about a decade ago), which is great, but definitely rougher in comparison.
Nothing since has come close.
My dude, you are in luck. Check out Unicorn Overlord!
It is absolutely a love letter to March of the Black Queen and Ogre Battle 64. As usual for their games, Vanillaware's art is outstanding.
Thanks for this. Had never heard of it. Unfortunately, no PC port :(
But yeah, OB64 sits stop a pedestal in its own gallery for me.
It's so frustrating that Unicorn Overlord doesn't have a PC port. Unfortunately, the devs seem to be anti-PC, despite lots of calls for it, from both fans and the publisher.
I felt like I was speaking to a wall for years. Glad I'm not alone in my views of OB64!
Same as the other poster, I can't play it, as I have no Playstation newer than a PS2. Maybe one day it'll get ported or someone else will create something for the PC.
> GameFAQs
Now there is some nostalgia.
I'd take 1000 GameFAQs .txt only pages over whatever slop Fandom wikis push. Goddamn videos on every page, etc.
The % is estimated based on the number of functions that still need to be recompiled. It is already possible to play and even create mods! As other recomp projects, you need to provide your own ROM.
A bit of trivia, since the start of the project I ordered the AI agents to produce a handoff for the next agent, so we have the whole timeline for the project as handoff docs: https://github.com/lfarroco/ogre-battle-64-recomp/tree/main/...
This is a great, structured way to help others decompile programs, thank you!
What is the legal status of recompilation projects like these? Greyer or less grey than emulators?
It's sad that we even have to think about this. Ogre Battle 64 is 27 years old now. Under the law that preceded the Copyright Act of 1976, it would be entering the public domain right about now.
It's absurd how long we've made copyright terms, and it's really endangering preservation.
> endangering preservation
Luckily preservationists are found outside such ridiculous jurisdictions, and most recognized titles have been preserved for a long while already.
True I just wish they didn't have to skulk in the dark for what is essentially a public service. I also think some projects aren't so lucky.
We probably have a pretty brief window where projects like this can even be done where there's people alive who worked on the original systems. It would be nice if these were encouraged rather than being in some gray area.
More infringing than emulators. De/recompilation projects are pretty clearly 'derivative works' of the original copyrighted program code, even if they require the original ROM in order to extract other assets necessary to compile a fully playable artifact.
The closer analogy would be fan-translation patches, which are also pretty clearly copyright-infringing derivative works though generally tolerated by rights holders.
Companies often encourage (or at least turn a blind eye to) creative derivative works from fan communities, especially if they're non-commercial and aren't cutting into the market share of their own official products enough for them to take notice.
This is a recomp project, not a decomp project; the original binary is supplied by the user, mechanically translated into source code at an architecture level (rather than a human-readable level), and patched. It’s AOT dynamic recompilation and the original IP isn’t distributed.
I do agree that decompilation projects are obviously not transformative (the only fair use feet they really have to stand on are purpose and market effect), but recomp projects are a little more interesting and might live on much less shaky footing.
Thank you for explaining this. I had the exact same misunderstanding as the parent poster, and was only corrected (and educated) by reading your comment.
A hypothetical relating to the legal aspects: Since this was mostly done by an LLM, the legal considerations would become incredibly interesting in cases where the original code (source or binary) was illegally leaked. What happens if the LLM saw the leaked code in its training material?
(My non-lawyer brain thinks it's completely obvious that in that case you have a derived work, but apparently the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived, so what the hell do I know…)
I think you are being misguided. The repository itself contains disassembly directly from the copyrighted ROM, and is thus not original work.
> the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived
I think it's more of a "the constitution is not a suicide pact" approach to GPL: while the GPL is obviously violated by its inclusion in the training corpus, we have two options:
- demand the destruction of LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works and the training of new ones
- accept that LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works are more important to humanity than the rights of the authors
Well if it's the second, then surely I can train my LLM using the frontier labs' models too? And have my LLM "interpret and reproduce" GTA 6?
How is any of this going to work out if we just decide to throw out copyright like this?
(I am well aware that it is not currently technically feasible to copyright-wash GTA 6. Replace that game with a best-selling novel or whatever.)
And, if we do decide that copyright is just gone, can we please make laws to that effect? Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and going "oh well, this new thing is useful, so we'll let it slide, but don't you dare to pirate movies, because reasons!"
> What happens if the LLM saw the leaked code in its training material?
Exactly the same that would happen if the LLM saw GPLed code in its training material and was asked to replicate it
> It’s AOT dynamic recompilation and the original IP isn’t distributed.
The Git repository contains tens of thousands of lines of assembler code that seem to come from the original.
I see that now… why did they check it in? One of the whole points of this approach is that that assembler should be trivial to re-derive by the end user since it’s just the original program listing. Some of the Xbox 360 recomp projects like https://github.com/mchughalex/skate3recomp offer a better example of how this pattern can be achieved without distributing the binary at any intermediate level.
It's basically the same as emulation as long as the recompiled code doesn't get distributed (which this project doesn't do AFAIK). Functionally the only difference between a "recomp" and traditional console emulation is that the assembly code that the CPU runs is translated to C then compiled to native code, rather than being interpreted or JIT compiled at runtime. Traditionally recompilation was mainly used when porting games to platforms where the emulation overhead would have been too much, like if you were making a GBA port of a Sega Genesis game. With these enhanced ports, I guess the idea is that if you're making a game specific "emulator" anyway, you might as well recompile the code and get rid of the overhead of interpretation.
Note that this isn't the same as a "decomp" where the goal is to make readable source code that resembles something that the original developers would have worked with. A "recomp" simply translates the assembly instructions to C. You end up with "assembly code but in C" rather than idiomatic C code.
I'm not aware of legal trouble involving the the Zelda 64 recomp project, which would have a much higher chance of attracting the attention of big N (especially now that a new version of OoT is coming out).
At least in the way that I see it, a recomp is like building your own turntable to play your vinyl records, after stydying their grooves and infering how they would sound (so I guess that it would be less gray than an emulator).
IIRC, EU have some laws protecting "interoperability", i.e. making a program work on other platforms. I suspect decompiling is considered as "interoperability".
No one can say anything, no game rom is ever bundled in the official releases of these recomps. We always have to provide the roms. Where from, it's another story.
So I've no clue how all this recompiling works, but why does the result of this process still need hardware that is at least two decades newer in order to run?
The hardware support is purely a function of the decision of this specific project to only target newer graphics APIs. The Ocarina of Time decomp for example supports older PC hardware through OpenGL and has also been ported to Dreamcast.
I know there are a lot of recomp projects like this out there - are there any sites dedicating to aggregating them all and tracking their progress?
https://decomp.dev/ is probably (roughly) what you're looking for.
How long until we have a registry of all N64 titles and the progress to full decomp of the entire library?
There's roughly ~350 games. It took me about two weeks in this project (and it's a complex game, with lots of different screens), but I had to babysit the AI a lot because it would get stuck multiple times. With the cambrian explosion of recomps, we can expect that in the next couple of years.
Nice I have not thought about this game in years.
Remember debugging that last weird edge case? These guys are almost there on a whole N64 game. Incredible effort!
Are there any similar projects that do recompilation for old DOS games? I am mainly interested in games written in Borland Turbo C, as I am trying to work out how one of them works. Some resources like tutorials would be great too.
Never heard of this game. Looking it up on Wikipedia it seems to have decent but not outstanding reviews. Does it have some kind of cult following? Or this notable for some other reason?
It was an unusual game in many aspects. Few copies were created, as the publisher had some issues. Its prerendered graphics aged very well. It has a small fan base. I recall that its gamefaqs guide had something like 60+ pages, given the amount of content and secrets that it has. In a console with few RPGs as the 64, it was an oasis.
The game has big attention for detail in both sprites and text. For example, at some point it unlocks a screen that lists all characters in a graph chart, with colored edges as their relation type - and it updates multiple times as the game progresses.
The strategy part of the franchise is mostly forgotten nowadays, there was only a recent remake for "let us cling together"(which is awesome as well, but it's in the tactics genre).
> The game received "favorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.[26] In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of 33 out of 40.[29] Nintendo Power gave it a favorable review while the game was still in development.[37] Vicious Sid of GamePro said, "Beneath Ogre Battle 64's intimidating interface and plodding pace lies a wealth of strategy: If you choose to enlist, be sure to pack plenty of patience."[40][d]
> The game won the award for "Best Strategy Game" at GameSpot's Best and Worst of 2000 Awards,[41] and was nominated for the "Best Game No One Played" award, which went to Samba de Amigo. The staff noted that the game's sales had "fallen prey to [its] console of origin, the N64."[42] The game was also nominated for the "Best Console Strategy Game" and "Gamers' Choice: N64" awards at The Electric Playground's Blister Awards 2000, both of which went to Front Mission 3 and Perfect Dark, respectively.[43][44]
> It was rated the 111th best game made on a Nintendo System in Nintendo Power's Top 200 Games list.[45] Reviewing the Virtual Console re-release, IGN said that it "was (and still is) lordly indeed".[34]
> In 2023, Time Extension included the game on their "Best Nintendo 64 Games of All Time" list.[46]
Sounds like it was received well even if it didn't sell well
[dead]
This is not a true recomp as it is being done by DeepSeek. Do not touch this.
All AI recomps are not to be used, nor considered true recomps. They likely contain stolen or copyrighted code.
> VC backed millennial advocates for skilled laborers with finite lifespans to perform unmonetizable, highly specialized labor instead of using an LLM
deeply unserious
>They likely contain stolen or copyrighted code.
How would that be possible when it's trying to byte-match the original binaries
The N64 SDK (Libultra) was leaked a while ago and is all proprietary, owned by Nintendo. Portal 64 was issued a DMCA by Valve partly on account of them not wanting to get on the bad side of Nintendo because it used Libultra.
It's not only possible but I would argue highly likely that any LLM has absorbed that proprietary code into its training data making effectively any decomp not a clean room effort if they incorporate assistance from LLMs or coding agents into their tooling. If Nintendo wanted to be particularly onerous they could easily claim that their codebase makes use of proprietary tooling/knowledge and there would be zero recourse for the devs.
The term for that is byte-matching decompilation. This is not such project.
What is a "true recomp"? If it works as the original did, then it's a recompilation no matter the author.
You may not like that the author is mostly an LLM, but the output clearly works.
They want an artisanal, hand-crafted decomp just like grandma used to make
"No true scotsman uses LLMs for a recompilation"