goldeneye-pc-port/.github/release-notes.md

GoldenEye 007 PC Port — v

Platforms: Windows x86-64 and Linux x86-64 (including Steam Deck). Region: NTSC-U (US) only. See Known issues.

The headline is 2–4 player split-screen multiplayer, the largest feature the N64 original had that this port was still missing. Alongside it come controller presets and rebinding, audio output options, a steady 60 fps on low-end hardware, and a round of fidelity and stability fixes checked against the N64 game.

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New features

2–4 player split-screen multiplayer (#99)

• Local multiplayer on every MP map, with the N64's own setup flow, pause/watch menus and per-player HUD.
• Who controls which player: 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 picks Auto (default), PadsOnly or KbmP1.
• A controller unplugged and replugged mid-match keeps its player (thanks to dolent, #122). Each controller's LED shows its player number.

Controller presets and rebinding (D469, D498)

F10 → Input → Controller (also in the front-end PC Options):

• Layout preset: the Xbox release's four styles: "1.1 Jinx" (the default, identical to before), "1.2 Christmas", "1.3 Frost" and "1.4 Elektra" (they swap which stick moves, looks, strafes and turns), or Custom.
• Custom: rebind every action per controller, up to two buttons each. Tap B or Back to cancel a capture, hold Back to clear. Menus always keep A/X accept and B/Y cancel, so you can't lock yourself out.
• Builds on ideas from italoarruda's #109 (credited as co-author).
• In the tank, the pad follows your layout too: the weapon button switches the tank's weapon and the use button gets out (D495).

PlayStation and Nintendo button names (D471)

PlayStation and Switch controllers show their own button names in the menus (Cross/Circle, ZL/ZR, …). Xbox and Steam Deck text is unchanged.

Audio output options (D470)

• Master volume, applied after the music and FX volumes.
• Output device: pick your audio device. A missing or unplugged device falls back to the system default.

Presets, filtering and the original look (D440, D447, D499)

• Original N64 preset (F10 → Graphics) sets every value the port changes back to the N64's; Port defaults preset restores the port's modern defaults.
• Aspect → Original shows the exact 4:3 frame with bars (16:9 while the game's own Ratio setting is 16:9).
• Texture filter → Trilinear, next to Bilinear: smooths distant textures that the game has no mipmaps for.

Options polish (D443, D472, D497, D502)

• Restart game row: applies restart-only settings such as anti-aliasing with one click.
• Clearer values: mouse sensitivity as ×, deadzone, vibration and volumes in whole %, field of view in horizontal degrees, anti-aliasing up to 16×.
• Front-end PC Options pages like the game's own dossiers: PREVIOUS and NEXT folder tabs, and B goes back a page. With a controller, the first item is highlighted when you open a section and you return to where you were when you leave it.
• The F10 overlay is pillarboxed in widescreen (instead of stretched), experimental options are shown in red, an unknown ge007.ini key shows a warning (#90), and with several controllers the one that opened the overlay drives it.

All unlocked no longer touches your save (D442)

It's now a memory-only override: switch it off and your real progress is back. Fake unlocks written by older builds are not repaired, so back up data/ge007.eep if you used it before.

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Performance

• A steady 60 fps on low-end hardware (D481, #92). Rendering ran on the same thread that delivers the game's 60 Hz timing signal, so slower GPUs regularly missed their frame slot and dropped to 30–45 fps. Rendering now runs on its own thread, like the N64's graphics chip. A 2011 laptop (Intel HD 3000) went from ~45 to a steady 60 fps at every setting.
• Lighter first-launch defaults on Atom/Celeron-class GPUs (D482, #92). On Intel HD 400–605 / UHD 600–605 class GPUs and software renderers, the first launch lowers draw distance, LOD distance and anti-aliasing. Settings you've changed yourself are never touched.
• No more in-play shader stutter (D480): shaders the game has used are compiled at startup on the next launch.
• Render-thread CPU roughly halved in typical scenes (D473), plus fewer redundant texture lookups and palette re-imports (D474, D476).

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Fidelity fixes (checked against the N64 game)

• Draw distance no longer changes AI behaviour (D466, #125). The extended draw distance (default 250%) let guards "see" you from beyond the N64's fog, so Xenia's fight on Jungle could start early. AI awareness now uses the level's original distance; you can still see, shoot and use everything that's drawn.
• Ultrawide and high field of view (D468): the AI keeps the N64's widest (16:9) view. Turn on AI sees the wider view if you prefer the old behaviour.
• Sniper rifle (#136): the scope zooms all the way in again (it was capped at about a third of the original magnification, D484); zoom speed matches the N64 (it was about twice as fast at 60 fps, D485); the crouch key now crouches and stands with it out, as it does in GEPD (D494).
• Turrets and explosions at 60 fps (D486, #126): turret fire rate, tracers, explosion density and screen-shake length now match the N64. Damage is unchanged. (Explosions that sometimes don't appear in heavy firefights are the N64's own behaviour: it has six explosion slots.)
• Weapons (#114–#118): automatic-fire cadence follows the N64's rules at any frame rate; grenade launcher recoil is back; the gun sways with mouse look again; the tank turns with the mouse; the run-over death sound no longer loops.
• Light fixtures go dark when shot, with the right impact effects (#119).
• Dam/Caverns water (D465, #127): the water animation no longer slides side to side, and it scrolls at the N64's rate.
• Kneeling guards use their crouched-rifle firing animation (D445, thanks dolent, #120).
• Dam: the first-tower guard walks his whole patrol instead of a small circle (D490).
• The Rareware logo in the intro renders correctly (D75).
• Props near some doorways no longer count as being in extra rooms, and ejected casings spin as authored (D491).

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Stability & fixes

• Knife-slash crash fixed (D454).
• 64-bit memory-layout fixes (D441, D453, D456, D457, D461, D462): two item/vertex tables were sized with N64 strides, and several pointer fields were truncated.
• A split-screen zero-size texture crash is guarded (D463); stale anisotropic filtering on recycled textures is fixed (D446, thanks dolent, #121).
• Skip intro no longer skips the failure dossier after a failed mission (D408).
• Adjusting the music volume with a controller in F10 no longer drops the frame rate (D489).
• Steam Deck: the Deck preset now also applies after a first launch in Desktop Mode (D283).
• Aztec: the area by the shuttle with the four turrets no longer breaks into stray triangles. The per-frame vertex buffer, sized for what the N64 could see, could overflow with the port's wider view (D500).
• In 3- and 4-player games, weapon pickup messages no longer show stray characters (D496).
• A controller no longer keeps vibrating after you quit mid-firefight (D493).
• Aspect → Original no longer shows a one-pixel strip of flickering pixels at the left and right edges (D493).
• Crash logs now include resolved stack frames, which makes reports far easier to act on.

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Known issues

• NTSC-U (US) ROMs only. PAL and JP ROMs convert, build and boot from source on this release's code, but the release packages don't support them yet (#85).
• No macOS or ARM builds yet.
• The first frame of a level takes a little longer while its textures upload: a brief dip in the FPS counter.
• Skip intro and All unlocked are still experimental.
• Far objects almost hidden in fog can show as a faint outline with straight edges (e.g. the satellite dish seen from Surface's start area). The N64's 16-bit colour hid it (D503).
• The full list, with workarounds, is the known-issues table.

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Downloads

File	Platform
goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-win64.zip	Windows x86-64
goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	Linux x86-64 (incl. Steam Deck)

Each contains the engine executable, a README, license texts, and the one-time asset tool. No ROM, no game assets. The Windows bundle carries its runtime DLLs and the Linux bundle carries SDL2, so nothing needs to be installed first.

Running it

You need your own GoldenEye 007 N64 ROM (US version, .z64).

1. Unpack the archive.
2. Make a data/ folder next to the executable and put the ROM in it, named ge007.ntsc-final.z64.
3. Run the executable from that folder. The first start takes a few extra seconds while it generates its asset files from your ROM.

Updating from an earlier version: unpack into a new folder and copy your ROM, ge007.eep (your progress) and ge007.ini (your settings) into its data/ folder. Don't copy the old pcmodels-* / pccg-* folders: the new version makes its own.

Steam Deck: do the steps above on the Deck, then add the executable as a non-Steam game. The options overlay opens with Select and is fully controller-driven.

Full steps, controls and troubleshooting are in the bundled README.md.

Verify the download

sha256sum -c goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-win64.zip.sha256
sha256sum -c goldeneye-pc-port-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz.sha256

Thanks

dolent (#120, #121, #122), italoarruda (#107, #109), MST246 (the #125 investigation and handoff used for the fix), JosephAHK (#133), MistaEcho (#119 via #87), and everyone who filed #92, #114–#119, #125, #126, #127, #129, #130 and #136.

Source & docs

https://github.com/jkdansereau/goldeneye-pc-port, built on the GoldenEye 007 decompilation, with its architecture modelled on the Perfect Dark PC port. Non-commercial fan preservation/research project; not affiliated with any rights holder. AI disclosure: built through agentic AI coding (Claude Code + a local open-weight model), directed by one person in their spare time. See the README's How it was made section for the full account.