goldeneye-pc-port/README.md

GoldenEye 007 PC Port

A native PC port of GoldenEye 007 (Rare, 1997, Nintendo 64), compiled from the GoldenEye 007 decompilation: the original N64 game running from reconstructed source, not the Xbox 360 remaster. The N64's graphics coprocessor (RSP) is emulated in software; every other hardware surface (video, audio, input, timers, save storage) is shimmed in a dedicated port/ layer, following the architecture of the Perfect Dark PC port, the same Rare "Indy" engine family, one hardware generation apart.

v0.2.0 (pre-release) is out for Windows and Linux — including Steam Deck, where the Linux bundle sideloads as-is — and runs the full campaign at a steady 60 fps with known rough edges (Status).

It's also a case study in AI-agent collaboration on a large, low-level codebase: two coding agents, driven by one person part-time, porting ~230 translation units of unmodified big-endian MIPS game code to a 64-bit desktop. See Background.

Important

You must supply your own GoldenEye 007 ROM. This repository contains no Nintendo code or assets, and no ROM. Nothing here is distributable as a playable game — see Requirements and Legal.

In-engine, running in the port — Bunker 1 and Dam attract views, and a ~15 s clip (the clip itself has no audio track): mission dossier → Facility → Silo → Jungle → Archives.

Download

Platform	Bundle	Notes
Windows (x86_64)	win64.zip	Engine + runtime DLLs + the one-time asset tool.
Linux (x86_64) / Steam Deck	linux tarball	SDL2 is bundled — runs as-is on any distro, and sideloads onto a Deck with nothing installed.

Both bundles contain no ROM and no game assets — you supply your own (see Requirements), which keeps the release legal to distribute. Earlier builds: v0.1.0 alpha, same page. You can also build it yourself; see Building.

Quick start

You need a GoldenEye 007 N64 ROM (.z64, big-endian; NTSC-U recommended — all three regions are supported). No ROM or game asset is included or distributed. Then:

1. Download the Windows or Linux bundle from Releases and unpack it.
2. Make a data/ folder next to the executable and drop the ROM in as ge007.ntsc-final.z64.
3. Run the one-time asset step: python3 prepare-assets/prepare-assets.py (Python 3.8+, stdlib only).
4. Launch the executable from that folder.

Read the Status caveats first — this is a pre-release.

Status

v0.2.0 (pre-release) — playable, with known rough edges. It runs the full single-player campaign at a steady 60 fps with no known crashes; the point of the pre-release is an end-to-end playtest that all 21 missions are completable start to finish on this build — feedback is welcome.

Working: boot sequence and front end (menu → mission select → briefing → start); all 21 solo missions load, render and are crash-free; steady 60 fps (software RSP off the presentation critical path); full audio — in-level music and SFX; keyboard + mouse (click-to-lock, proportional aim mode) and a modern dual-stick controller layout; file-backed saves; F10 in-game options overlay (resolution, frame cap, MSAA, filtering, FOV, sensitivity); Windows and Linux.

Known issues:

• Cutscenes glitch frequently — skipped beats, wrong camera, misplaced or hovering actors, wrong timing. The most visible gap in this release.
• A few in-level music tracks sound wrong (wrong instruments, occasional garbling).
• Particle colours drift through a rainbow palette instead of holding their grey/orange intent (bullet sparks, lingering smoke/explosion residue).
• Water levels show a moving seam between two water patterns; pixel strips at the left/right screen edges at non-integer scales; some front-end 3D models (spinning Nintendo logo, MISSION COMPLETE / mode-select) mispositioned or absent. Assorted further cosmetic defects are tracked in docs/dev/GRAPHICS-BACKLOG.md.
• No macOS or ARM support; no controller rebinding UI.

Root causes and fix status for every item: the release notes and the finding log in docs/dev/findings.md.

Steam Deck

The Linux bundle is the Deck build. SFTP it over from your PC, or download it straight from the releases page on the Deck itself: unzip, drop your ROM in data/, run prepare-assets once, and add the executable as a non-Steam game. SDL2 is bundled, so no dependencies need installing. On SteamOS the first launch seeds ge007.ini with Deck-friendly defaults — native 1280×800 fullscreen, VSync, MSAA 4, and 150% draw/LOD distance (the authored N64 fade distances read short on the close-up panel); everything is changeable in the options overlay and persists afterwards. The renderer is CPU-bound (software RSP); expect original N64-era performance at 60 fps rather than more. A v0.1.0-era crash on the Deck in Facility was never reproduced and its prime suspect has since been fixed, but this release has not yet been verified on real Deck hardware.

In-game settings on the Deck. The options overlay is fully gamepad-driven: it opens with Select, the D-pad or left stick (up/down) moves between options, A steps the selected option forward, B steps it back, and Start (or Select again) closes. Toggles flip, resolution / MSAA / filtering cycle, sliders step in increments. With a keyboard attached the same overlay is F10 + arrows/Enter.

Beyond playing

• Tweak it — ge007.ini and the F10 in-game overlay expose resolution, frame cap, MSAA, texture filtering, FOV/draw distance and mouse feel; launch with -fresh for a clean-slate run.
• Read it — docs/internals.md maps the architecture and the software RSP; docs/porting-notes.md is the catalogue of N64→PC bug classes hit along the way. Game logic in src/ is unmodified decompilation; every hardware surface lives in the MIT-licensed port/ layer.
• Mod it — the port layer, build system and tools_pc/ are yours to extend (see License); CONTRIBUTING.md has the ground rules for getting changes in, and docs/dev/ is the raw engineering record behind every fix.

Background

The port was built by two coding agents — a local open-weight model (unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF on one RTX 5090, via the pi agent) doing the groundwork (build, boot chain, software-RSP integration, asset pipeline, first frames), and Claude Code (Sonnet 5, Opus 5 for the hardest bugs) joining for the collaborative phase (the 21-level sweep, the ABI finding catalog, SDL input, front end) — handing work back and forth through shared written notes, directed by one person part-time. In short: ~3.5 weeks, ~430 commits, 200+ root-caused bugs logged.

The full write-up (timeline, handoff mechanism, effort breakdown, an honest "what worked / what didn't"): docs/dev/agentic-development.md. The workflow itself: docs/dev-process.md. To cite the project or its findings: CITATION.cff (GitHub's "Cite this repository" menu).

How this differs from the other GoldenEye PC projects

This is a native port of the original 1997 Nintendo 64 game, built from its actual reconstructed source code, the same lineage as the Perfect Dark PC port. The other well-known "GoldenEye on PC" projects are something different: they machine-translate the shipped binary of the unreleased Xbox 360 XBLA remaster, a different game on a different codebase with no shared code with this one.

	This project	GoldenEye-Recomp / Steam Deck build
What it ports	The original Nintendo 64 game (1997)	The Xbox 360 XBLA HD remaster (built ~2007, never released)
How	Decompilation-based source port — human-reconstructed C, compiled for the host; game logic runs as written	Static binary recompilation — the shipped machine code is auto-translated to C; no source-level understanding
Lineage	GoldenEye 007 decompilation + Perfect Dark PC port engine family	Xbox 360 "…Recompiled" static-recompilation family
Renderer	Software RSP → OpenGL	Hardware (Vulkan)
Status	v0.2.0 pre-release; see Status	Playable full game, higher frame rates, online multiplayer
Why it exists	A case study in AI-agent collaboration on a hard low-level codebase	A polished, playable PC release of the remaster

If you just want to play GoldenEye on PC today, use one of the recompilation projects: they are finished and this is not. What's here is the other half, getting the original game running from source.

Requirements

You need a GoldenEye 007 (Nintendo 64) ROM that you legally own, in big-endian (.z64) format, matching one of:

Region	ROMID	ROM filename (in data/)	SHA-1
NTSC-U (US)	ntsc-final	ge007.ntsc-final.z64	abe01e4aeb033b6c0836819f549c791b26cfde83
PAL (EU)	pal-final	ge007.pal-final.z64	167c3c433dec1f1eb921736f7d53fac8cb45ee31
NTSC-J (JP)	jpn-final	ge007.jpn-final.z64	2a5dade32f7fad6c73c659d2026994632c1b3174

US is the recommended and best-tested version.

The port also relies on the decompilation's asset-extraction step, which pulls the level, model, texture and music data out of your ROM at build time. That step, too, requires your ROM and is part of Building.

Building

Prerequisites: CMake >= 3.16, a C/C++ toolchain, SDL2, zlib, OpenGL, Python 3, plus the decompilation's own build dependencies (an IRIX MIPS toolchain via qemu-irix, used only for the one-time asset extraction). See docs/building.md for the full walkthrough and the asset-extraction details.

Windows (MSYS2)

# in the MINGW64 shell
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 \
          mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake \
          mingw-w64-x86_64-python make git

git clone https://github.com/jkdansereau/goldeneye-pc-port.git
cd goldeneye-pc-port
# 1. extract assets from your ROM (see docs/building.md)
# 2. build the port
./build-pc.sh ntsc-final          # or pal-final / jpn-final

Linux

The Linux build is compiled on every push by CI (ubuntu-24.04); the release bundle additionally bundles SDL2 so no system packages are needed at runtime.

sudo apt install build-essential cmake python3 libsdl2-dev zlib1g-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
git clone https://github.com/jkdansereau/goldeneye-pc-port.git
cd goldeneye-pc-port
# extract assets (docs/building.md), then:
./build-pc.sh ntsc-final

The executable is written to build-pc/ge007.x86_64 (on Windows, build-pc/ge007.x86_64.exe).

Running

1. Create a data/ directory in the repo root.
2. Put your ROM in it, named as in the table above (e.g. data/ge007.ntsc-final.z64).
3. Run the executable from the repo root: ./build-pc/ge007.x86_64.

Configuration is written to ge007.ini on first run; game progress lives in ge007.eep. Launch with -fresh to wipe both before starting (a clean-slate run for playtesting).

Default controls

Action	Keyboard / mouse	Controller
Move / strafe	W A S D / arrows	Left stick (or D-pad)
Aim / look	Mouse	Right stick
Fire (Z)	Left mouse / LCtrl	Right trigger
Aim mode (R)	Right mouse / LShift	Left trigger
Use / accept (A)	Space / E / X	A / X
Reload / cancel (B)	R / F	B / Y
Next weapon	Mouse wheel up	RB
Previous weapon	Mouse wheel down	LB
Start	Enter / Tab	Start
Options overlay	F10	Select (D-pad/stick + A/B navigate, Start closes)

The controller layout follows the modern dual-stick scheme used by the console re-releases (left stick move, right stick look, triggers fire/aim, shoulders cycle weapons).

Mouse sensitivity, Y-inversion and the aim/turn split are tunable in the [Input] section of ge007.ini.

How it works

The R4300 game code in src/ is compiled completely unmodified; the decompilation's control flow is ground truth. Everything that would touch N64 hardware is redirected into port/: a software RSP (port/fast3d/, adapted from the Perfect Dark port) that interprets the GBI display list the game builds each frame and emits OpenGL, bypassing the RDP; a scheduler replacement (port/src/gesched.c) that drives it directly; single-threaded libultra OS shims (port/src/libultra.c); and SDL2/OpenGL/filesystem backends for video, audio, input and storage. The 32→64-bit transition forces a small, cataloged class of mechanical ABI-only edits to ROM-serialized structs (pointer-width reconciliation); these change no behavior and are documented individually. Where it diverges from the Perfect Dark port: GoldenEye's N64 serialized asset formats are converted offline by Python "sidecar" converters in tools_pc/ rather than fixed up at load time. Full detail: docs/internals.md and docs/porting-notes.md.

CMakeLists.txt      PC build (parallel to the decomp's Makefile, which is untouched)
build-pc.sh         configure + build helper
src/  include/      the decompilation (game + libultra) - compiled unmodified
port/
  fast3d/           software RSP -> OpenGL
  src/              port layer (main, OS shims, video, audio, input, fs, ...)
  include/          port-facing headers
tools/  Makefile    the N64 build + asset extraction (from the decomp; do not modify)
tools_pc/           PC-port helper + analysis scripts
docs/               see below

Documentation

Key docs are also published as a site: https://jkdansereau.github.io/goldeneye-pc-port/.

Doc	What's in it
docs/building.md	Full build + asset-extraction guide.
docs/internals.md	Architecture, the RSP-emulation approach, GE-vs-PD engine differences, the phased plan.
docs/porting-notes.md	The recurring N64→PC bug classes hit during the port, with fixes.
docs/dev/agentic-development.md	The research angle: the two-agent setup, timeline, handoff workflow, and an assessment of what did and didn't work.
docs/dev-process.md	The investigation workflow in detail — budgets, file partitioning, the finding-log discipline.
docs/dev/	The raw engineering record: the full finding log, per-level status, graphics backlog, playtest matrices, and docs/dev/game-behavior-reference.md (a secondary-sourced playtest reference for how the retail game is meant to behave — repo-only, code is ground truth).
docs/SetupGuide.md, docs/StyleGuide.md	Inherited from the decompilation this repo forks.

Credits

This port is a thin layer on a large amount of other people's work.

Prior work it is built on

• The GoldenEye 007 decompilation — years of effort by Larry Ficken ("kholdfuzion") and the project's contributors; plus zoinkity's GoldenEye documentation, which the decomp started from. This port is a fork of that repository.
• The Perfect Dark PC port (Ryan Dwyer and contributors) — the reference architecture for this port and the source of the fast3d software RSP.
• The Perfect Dark decompilation — the sibling decomp the PD port is built on.
• Carnivorous — author of the Mouse Injector input plugin for 1964 (the "GEPD Edition" bundle). Its mouse-aim behaviour for GoldenEye/Perfect Dark is what our in-game GEPD-style aim mode is modelled on; the implementation here is an independent reimplementation of that behaviour, not derived code. Thanks also to Rice and schibo of the 1964 team for the emulator it shipped with.

Vendored / adapted code

• port/fast3d/ — the software RSP, adapted from the PD port. It originates with the Ship of Harkinian / libultraship fast3d (© Emill, MaikelChan; MIT — see port/fast3d/LICENSE.txt), which itself descends from sm64-port's fast3d and audio mixer.
• port/fast3d/glad/ — OpenGL loader generated by glad (David Herberth, MIT).
• The decompilation toolchain: ido-static-recomp (Emill / decompals), qemu-irix and rabbitizer (n64decomp).
• SDL2 and zlib.

Methodology

• Chris Lewis, "Decompiling a Nintendo 64 Game in 84 Days" (the Snowboard Kids decompilation write-up) — the agent-workflow practices in docs/dev-process.md are adapted from it.

Tools and models used to develop the port

• Qwen 3.8 (Alibaba Qwen team), run locally as the unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF UD-Q4_K_XL quant; Unsloth (the GGUF quantisation and Unsloth Desktop, used as the local model server).
• pi — the local coding-agent harness.
• Claude / Claude Code (Anthropic).

Legal

This is a non-commercial fan preservation/research project, in the same category as the many other N64 decompilation and native-port repositories on GitHub. It follows the same conventions they do:

• No ROM and no game assets are distributed — not in this repository and not in any release. Textures, audio, models, level data and in-game text are extracted from a ROM you already own, on your machine, at build time.
• The repository is a fork of the public GoldenEye 007 decompilation and inherits its contents unmodified (see NOTICE for what that includes).
• No official logos, box art, or marketing assets are used. "GoldenEye 007", "007", "James Bond" and related marks belong to their respective owners (Nintendo, Microsoft/Rare, MGM, Danjaq, EON Productions).
• Pre-built binaries published under Releases contain only the engine (the port/ layer plus the compiled decompilation, with no game data of any kind), bundled with permissively-licensed runtime libraries (SDL2, zlib, the MinGW runtime; their licenses travel in the download). Any build, yours or ours, is useless without a ROM you supply.

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Nintendo, Rare, Microsoft, MGM, Danjaq, EON Productions, or any rights holder in GoldenEye or James Bond. If you are a rights holder with a concern, open an issue and it will be addressed.

License

The original work in this repository, the port layer (port/), the PC build system, tools_pc/, and the documentation, is released under the MIT License; see LICENSE. Everything inherited from the upstream decompilation is covered by NOTICE, not by that license.