goldeneye-pc-port/docs/security-and-fidelity-status.md

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title: Security & fidelity status description: What a release actually installs (no networking, no telemetry, no ROM or assets) and how faithfully the port tracks the original N64 game's logic.

Security & fidelity status

This page answers two questions plainly: what does installing this put on your machine, and how faithfully does the port actually reproduce the original N64 game's logic. Both were reviewed end-to-end on 2026-09-15 and re-verified for the v0.3.0 release bundles on 2026-09-18 (bundle contents, no-networking source check, and the asset converter). The full engineering record behind each item is in the project's finding log (docs/dev/findings.md).

What a release actually installs

Each release (goldeneye-pc-port-*-win64.zip / -linux-x86_64.tar.gz) contains, and only contains: the game engine executable, a fixed set of standard runtime libraries (SDL2, zlib, and the MinGW/Linux runtime — no third-party downloads), the one-time ROM-to-PC asset converter, a README, and license texts. The build scripts hard-fail if a ROM image or an oversized blob ends up in the bundle. No ROM, no game assets (textures, audio, models, levels, text) are ever shipped — you supply your own legally-owned copy.

At runtime, the engine:

• has no networking of any kind (no sockets, no HTTP, checked directly against the source),
• has no telemetry, crash reporting, or analytics of any kind,
• never touches the Windows registry and never requests elevated permissions,
• writes save data, config, and derived ROM assets only inside its own folder — never to %APPDATA%, Program Files, or any system location.

The one-time asset converter (ge007-convert / prepare-assets.py) — the part of the bundle most likely to draw suspicion, since it's the thing that reads your ROM and writes new files — has no network access at all, verifies your ROM against a fixed table of known retail GoldenEye 007 hashes before touching it (an unrecognized file is rejected outright), and writes only inside the bundle folder. Its full source ships right next to the compiled version in every release if you'd like to read it yourself.

See SECURITY.md for why the binaries are unsigned and what that means in practice (a SmartScreen prompt on first run, and why some antivirus engines flag the converter specifically).

Building from source

Cloning and building pulls in only standard, well-known packages: MSYS2 pacman packages on Windows, apt packages on Linux — no npm, no cargo, nothing downloaded at CMake configure time, no git submodules, and no prebuilt binaries checked into the repository. One real gap: the CI build installs pyinstaller from PyPI without pinning a version, which is used to freeze the release's asset-converter tool. It's a widely-used packaging tool, and what it packages is entirely in-repo, stdlib-only Python — but an unpinned dependency means a future PyInstaller release could change what ships without a corresponding diff in this repository. Pinning it is a tracked follow-up.

One development-only backdoor exists in source builds: the GE_DEBUG_UNLOCKALL environment variable (src/game/file2.c) pre-unlocks all cheat options at boot. It is off unless explicitly set, changes no shipped behavior, and is documented here so the env-var surface stays fully accounted for.

Fidelity to the original N64 game

The port's non-negotiable rule is that decompiled game logic is never changed — only genuine N64-hardware dependencies get a PC-side replacement, in the port/ layer. This was audited directly:

• Region build macros exactly mirror the original N64 Makefile's macro sets for all three regions — verified line-by-line.
• The audio/library file classification (which original files compile vs. get PC-shimmed) exactly matches the project's own ground-truth manifest — no silent gaps, no silent duplicates.
• The one shipped game-logic-adjacent change (a portal-culling float-precision fix, D271) is #ifdef PORT-gated, documented in the finding log, and moves toward matching N64 behavior, not away from it. Every other deviation from the decompiled source is one of the documented 32→64-bit pointer-width ABI corrections described above.

One issue, found and fixed before v0.3.0 shipped: the port's random-number generator (port/src/random.c) was documented as a bit-exact port of the N64's PRNG, but wasn't — a shift-operation helper didn't match the real MIPS64 instruction semantics it was meant to mirror. This was independently confirmed by hand-tracing the assembly against the C port, tracked as finding D284, and fixed before the release (verified clean across a full level sweep — all 20 missions plus the ending sequence — no crashes). It affected loot placement, AI behavior variance, and replay-state determinism from the very first random draw, in every release before v0.3.0. Because of the fix, RNG-derived output — including the save-file CRC — changed, which meant existing save files and any previously recorded replays no longer validate; v0.3.0's release notes describe the automatic save migration that handles this. We'd rather say this plainly than let a "verified bit-exact" claim stand uncorrected, both when it was wrong and now that it's fixed.

Everything else checked (the documented ABI/pointer-width exceptions used for the 32-to-64-bit transition, a sample of the finding log's own claimed fixes against the actual current code) matched what's documented.

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This page is kept current alongside future releases. Its source review is a manual, human-reviewed process today — see the project roadmap for plans to partially automate the mechanical parts of it.