Zelda: Majora’s Mask is now a native PC game, and every N64 title could follow its lead

Zelda: Majora’s Mask is now a native PC game, and every N64 title could follow its lead

I thought opening the impossible door in Mario 64 was the coolest thing that’d happened to the Nintendo 64 in years, but Mr. Wiseguy’s just-released N64 Recompiled blows me away. It’s a tool that theoretically lets you turn any N64 game into a native PC port, the better to play and preserve N64 games — and to showcase its abilities, you can already download Windows and Linux-native apps for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask that seem to run incredibly well.

It almost seems too good to be true: I just double-clicked an EXE file on my Windows laptop, told the app where to find a Majora’s Mask ROM file, and was immediately playing a copy of the game that felt incredibly responsive to my every press on a 165Hz variable refresh rate screen, with remappable controls, adjustable resolution, and a primitive form of auto-save.

Now imagine if you could do that for any Nintendo 64 game! Wiseguy says their tool works by statically recompiling N64 binaries into C code that can then be compiled into native apps for any platform and has even gotten the dreaded Superman 64 to work.

What’s more, Wiseguy says N64 ray tracing and texture packs are also on the way! He’s got teasers in this video:

To be clear, these recompiled N64 apps do not include the game itself, which is part of their charm — while protective Nintendo lawyers might argue they encourage piracy, they do not redistribute the ROM files you’d need to actually play the copyrighted Nintendo works.

While I haven’t yet been able to recompile a random game myself with the tool (it currently requires metadata that seemingly needs to be harvested from a game), and I can’t personally vouch for how well Majora’s Mask works after hours and hours of play, the video by YouTuber Nerrel atop this story makes it sound pretty fantastic.