goldeneye-pc-port/docs/user-guide.md

title, description

title	description
User guide	Controls, settings, files, ROM check, updating, emulator saves, macOS setup and troubleshooting for the GoldenEye 007 PC port.

User guide

Everything beyond the Quick start: the full controls, every setting and file, and fixes for common problems.

• Controls
• Feature list
• Settings and files
• What's a ROM?
• macOS (Apple Silicon, experimental)
• Updating · Using an emulator save · Uninstalling
• Troubleshooting

Controls

Action	Keyboard / mouse	Controller
Move / strafe	W A S D	Left stick (or D-pad)
Move / turn	Arrow keys	—
Aim / look	Mouse	Right stick
Fire	Left mouse	Right trigger
Aim mode	Right mouse / LShift	Left trigger / LB
Use / interact	E	A
Reload	R	X
Crouch (toggles)	LCtrl	Left or right stick click
Cycle owned gadgets	Watch inventory	B
Next weapon	Mouse wheel down / Q	Y
Previous weapon	Mouse wheel up	—
Start	Enter / Tab	Start
Options overlay	F10	Select

The keyboard defaults are a GEPD-style layout. The controller layout matches Rare's Xbox 1.1 (Jinx) button roles; the other Xbox styles (1.2 Christmas, 1.3 Frost, 1.4 Elektra, which swap the stick roles) are selectable under Controller (pick a player first, then Layout preset). PlayStation and Nintendo controllers show their own button names in the menus.

Control style: Controller → Control style (named after the watch's own setting, with Perfect Dark's "Ext" for the port's controls) picks how the game's controller style (the watch's 1.1–1.4 selector) is treated. Ext (the default) keeps the port's feel and fixes the style itself, so the watch's selector has no effect. Original stops the port from touching the style: pick 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 or 1.4 on the watch (or in the multiplayer setup) and it behaves as on the N64, and the Controller page then offers the game's own styles ("Controller style", 1.1 Honey to 2.4 Goodhead, saved in the Bond file like the watch's) instead of the layout presets, which apply in Ext only. Buttons are passed through as the N64's buttons, so 1.3 and 1.4 move fire and aim exactly as the console does. The 2.x dual-controller styles run faithfully too: the game reads their second stick from the next controller slot, which the port does not map yet (a second pad assigned to that slot should provide it, untested), so with one pad pick a 1.x style. Saves made with earlier builds may hold 1.2 (the port wrote its forced style back into the save), so when you switch to the Original control style, pick your style on the watch once.

In the Original control style the pad is a strict virtual N64 controller in every context (stage, menus, watch, tank): each press sends the native N64 button and the game decides what it means (so B uses a door or reloads, as on the console). Default layout, remappable per player in the ini (Input.N64Pad.<Button>, Input.N64Pad2..4 for players 2-4; up to two pad buttons each) and with Input.N64StickFeel (1 = linear +/-80 stick with a small dead centre, 0 = the Ext deadzone):

Pad	N64	Pad	N64
South (A)	A	Right stick	C buttons
West (X)	B	Left stick	Analog stick
Right trigger	Z	D-pad	D-pad
Left trigger / RB	R	Start	Start
LB	L	Back	PC options overlay

Rebinding: Key Bindings in the options overlay rebinds the keyboard and mouse (one list: movement, then actions). Controller buttons are rebindable per controller under Controller (pick a player first): set Layout preset to Custom, select an action and press a pad button (tap B or Esc to cancel, hold B to bind B itself, hold Back to clear; Y clears the selected slot). Each action takes up to two buttons. Menus always keep A/X accept and B/Y cancel, so you can't lock yourself out. There is no warning yet when two actions share a button, and the Xbox release's "left stick aims the crosshair" and "D-pad copies the left stick" behaviors are not reproduced (here the right stick aims and the D-pad strafes, as on the N64).

Split-screen: pick Multiplayer from the main menu. With one controller, keyboard/mouse is player 1 and the controller is player 2; with two or more controllers, the controllers take players 1–4 (Input.MPMode in ge007.ini changes this). A controller unplugged mid-match keeps its player when plugged back in.

Options overlay with a controller (also how it works on the Deck): Select opens it, the D-pad or left stick moves between rows and left/right adjusts the selected value, A opens a page or toggles a row, B goes back one page (and closes from the top), and Start (or Select again) closes. With a keyboard, use F10, the arrow keys, Enter and Backspace.

Feature list

• Split-screen multiplayer for up to 4 players, with the N64's own setup flow and per-player HUD.
• Native widescreen at any aspect ratio: the world is undistorted, the HUD sits at the screen edges, and 4:3 menus are pillarboxed. FOV and draw/LOD distance are adjustable, and AI behaviour stays as on the N64 whatever you set them to.
• The original look in one click: the Display mode row (F10 → Video) switches between Modern and Original N64 (it reads Custom once you edit a setting it covers), and Aspect ratio → Original shows the exact 4:3 frame.
• A steady 60 fps, with VSync and a frame cap (30 or 60), including on the low-end GPUs I test on.
• Frame rates above 60: 90, 120, 144, 165 or 240 fps, or Auto to match your display (up to 240). Extra frames are blended between game ticks (the game still runs at its original rate), at the cost of one tick of latency. It has no effect on a 60 Hz display, and the Original N64 preset keeps 60. See framerate and pacing.
• macOS (Apple Silicon), experimental: a macos-arm64 download, not notarized (one Terminal command to unblock it, see macOS), or build from source. I'd like test reports.
• Graphics options: resolution, borderless or exclusive fullscreen, a Center window action while windowed, MSAA (up to 16×), anisotropic filtering, and nearest, bilinear, trilinear or the N64's own 3-point texture filter.
• Mouse aim in your choice of style (the N64's, or centered FPS-style) with per-device sensitivity, smoothing and Y-inversion.
• Modern controller support: dual-stick layout, deadzones, sensitivity, southpaw, trigger thresholds, rumble-pak vibration, and PlayStation/Nintendo button names.
• Rebindable controls for keyboard, mouse and each controller.
• HUD and crosshair options: HUD scale (also scales the in-game options menu), an optional always-on crosshair, a custom RGB crosshair color with adjustable opacity and a health-based color, and a no-hit-flash option.
• Full audio: in-level music and sound effects, with music, FX and master volume and a choice of output device.
• An in-game options overlay (F10 / pad Select) for all of the above, saved automatically; the game's crosshair is the mouse pointer, and each page has a Reset to defaults row.
• Faithful N64 progression by default. Opt-in extras: Skip intro and All unlocked (every level, 007 mode and the full cheat menu, without touching your save), and Check for updates (off by default; one request to GitHub per launch when on, see Security).
• Saves in a plain file next to the game, so backing up is a file copy; 1964 and Project64 saves load directly (details).

Settings and files

Options overlay: press F10 (pad: Select) in game or in the menus; on the file-select screen the PC Options entry opens it too. Changes are saved automatically. Most settings live in ge007.ini; the ones that come from the game's own watch menu (auto-aim, aim control, sight, look ahead, ammo on screen, screen size, screen ratio, music and FX volume) are part of your save, as on the N64. Screen size (Full / Wide / Cinema) and screen ratio (Normal / 16:9) combine with the PC Aspect ratio setting: Aspect ratio owns the window shape, while the watch's two options only change what the game renders inside it.

Where files live: everything stays inside the game's own folder. The port never writes to %APPDATA%, the registry or any system location.

File	What it is
data/ge007.ntsc-final.z64	Your ROM (you put it there).
data/ge007.eep	Your game progress (the N64 save).
data/ge007.ini	Settings, written on first start.
data/pcmodels-<region>/, data/pccg-<region>/	Asset files generated from your ROM on first start. Safe to delete: they are made again on the next start.
data/ge007.shaders	A list of the graphics shaders the game used, compiled at startup to avoid stutter. Safe to delete.
ge007.crash.log	Written in the folder you launched from if the game crashes.

Removing ROM-derived content: the only files on your machine that come from the game are the ROM you put there and the two generated asset folders (data/pcmodels-<region>/, data/pccg-<region>/). Delete those and every ROM-derived file is gone; your save (ge007.eep) and settings (ge007.ini) are separate files, yours to keep or delete.

ge007.ini uses [Section] headers and Key = value lines. A few common keys and their defaults:

[Video]
Fullscreen = 0
VSync = 1
FpsCap = -1
MSAA = 2
TextureFilter = 1
NativeWidescreen = 1
FovScale = 100
DrawDistance = 200

[Audio]
MasterVolume = 100

Fullscreen 1 is borderless fullscreen; FpsCap -1 is Auto (match the display, up to 240), 0 is uncapped, otherwise a fps cap (30, 60, or 90 to 240 for frame interpolation on a faster display; an existing ini keeps its value); TextureFilter is 0 nearest, 1 bilinear, 2 the N64 3-point filter, 3 trilinear; FovScale and DrawDistance are percentages of the original (the options overlay shows the field of view in degrees). On Atom/Celeron-class GPUs the first launch writes lighter values for draw distance, LOD distance and MSAA. Edit the file with the game closed: it is rewritten on a clean exit, and comments are dropped.

Launch options: -fresh wipes the save and settings before starting (a clean-slate run). --version prints the build id.

What's a ROM?

A ROM is a copy of the game cartridge's data, made with a cartridge dumper from a cartridge you own. This project can't provide or link one. The port needs the big-endian .z64 format, and supports the US version today:

Region	ROM filename (in data/)	SHA-1	Supported
NTSC-U (US)	ge007.ntsc-final.z64	abe01e4aeb033b6c0836819f549c791b26cfde83	yes
PAL (EU)	ge007.pal-final.z64	167c3c433dec1f1eb921736f7d53fac8cb45ee31	not yet (#85)
NTSC-J (JP)	ge007.jpn-final.z64	2a5dade32f7fad6c73c659d2026994632c1b3174	not yet (#85)

To check which file you have, compute its SHA-1: on Windows, certutil -hashfile ge007.ntsc-final.z64 SHA1; on Linux, sha1sum ge007.ntsc-final.z64.

macOS (Apple Silicon, experimental)

Download: goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-macos-arm64.tar.gz from the release page, for Apple Silicon (M1 or later), macOS 14 or newer. It bundles SDL2 and the C++ runtime, so Homebrew is not needed. The app is experimental and not signed with an Apple Developer ID or notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks it when it comes from a download. Unpack it, then run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine <folder> in Terminal once, before the first launch:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-macos-arm64

Or skip the quarantine step by downloading in Terminal instead of a browser (curl does not mark the file, so Gatekeeper never checks it):

curl -L https://github.com/jkdansereau/goldeneye-pc-port/releases/download/v<version>/goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-macos-arm64.tar.gz | tar xz

Without Terminal: after macOS blocks the first launch, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about ge007.aarch64 and click Open Anyway (macOS 15 removed the old right-click → Open bypass).

Then set up data/ with your ROM as in the package README and run ./ge007.aarch64 from that folder in Terminal. If you launch it first, the process stalls before the window appears (it never reached main in my test; that is most likely Gatekeeper, and clearing the flag afterwards did not unstick that copy), so re-extract the archive and clear the flag before launching. If the window ever stays black on the very first start, close it and start it again; later launches start normally. I have run the package on one M3 Mac only, so test reports (what Mac, what macOS, what happened) are very welcome.

Updating

Extract the new release into a new folder, then copy your ROM, ge007.eep and ge007.ini from the old data/ folder into the new one. Don't copy the generated pcmodels-* and pccg-* folders: the new version makes its own on first start, and stale ones from an older version can cause glitches.

Using an emulator save

Saves from N64 emulators (1964, Project64, …) load directly: with the game closed, just copy your .eep to data/ge007.eep. On first launch the game detects the emulator byte order and converts it in place, keeping a backup of the original file next to it as ge007.eep.emulator.bak (never overwriting an existing one). Any slot that is corrupt in both formats is left alone and gets reset by the game, exactly as before. An existing port save is untouched.

To take a save back into an emulator, use the small converter that ships in the release folder as tools/eep_convert.py (tools_pc/eep_convert.py in a source checkout; plain Python 3, no dependencies):

python tools/eep_convert.py pc-to-n64 data/ge007.eep back-to-emulator.eep  # port -> emulator
python tools/eep_convert.py verify some-file.eep    # which format is this?

verify checks every save checksum and, without --as n64|pc, tells you which convention the file uses.

Uninstalling

Delete the folder. The port writes nothing anywhere else, so that removes the game, your save and your settings; back up data/ge007.eep first if you want to keep your progress.

Troubleshooting

• The game says the ROM is missing or wrong: check it is in data/, named ge007.ntsc-final.z64, in .z64 byte order, and that its SHA-1 matches the US row in What's a ROM?. PAL and JP ROMs are not supported yet.
• Windows shows a SmartScreen warning: the exe is not code-signed. Click More info, then Run anyway.
• Black screen or no window: update your graphics driver; the port needs OpenGL 3.0.
• Wrong resolution on the Steam Deck: F10 → Video → Resolution.
• Where are my saves? data/ge007.eep. Copy it somewhere safe while the game is not running to back it up.
• The game crashes: open an issue and attach ge007.crash.log (in the folder you launched from), the output of --version, your OS, your GPU and your ROM's SHA-1. Never attach the ROM itself.