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

GoldenEye 007 PC Port

The full single-player campaign runs at a steady 60 fps with audio (music + SFX) playing throughout, on Windows and Linux including Steam Deck, and it is completable end to end: the whole campaign has been playtested through all 21 missions (Agent difficulty). It's an early public cut: all 21 solo missions load and run crash-free, but the known issues below are real; feedback is very welcome. This is a pre-1.0 release, not a finished product — expect rough edges and missing features until v1.0; see the README's Roadmap section for where this is headed.

What's new since v0.2.2

• Bond is fixed in cutscenes — the most visible remaining glitch in prior releases: Bond no longer floats or glitches out during cutscenes, his animation no longer breaks or repeats, and the camera correctly tracks him through scripted sequences including all three Dam end-of-level abseil shots (D243). Root cause: a 32-bit-era struct-size constant in the cutscene body-model setup never accounted for 64-bit pointer widening, corrupting the model's own animation-timing fields on creation. Fixing that also fixed the associated camera shake, which had previously been worked around with a camera-freeze hack that's no longer needed. Two related reports also cleared up as a side effect: Bond's third-person model floating above the ground at level start, and death animations sinking him into the floor, both shared an underlying mechanism with this bug — Bond now ends up in the right place the large majority of the time, with only a small positional drift on the rare occasion he's off (D173/ D292).
• Particle colors mostly fixed: bullet-impact sparks and lingering smoke/explosion residue no longer cycle through a rainbow palette (D219) — root cause was a hardcoded raw-memory-offset read into the spark's stored color that landed on the wrong bytes once the containing struct grew from 64-bit pointer widening. A second, separate cause was found and fixed in explosion rendering itself (an out-of-bounds vertex-buffer write corrupting adjacent particle data). This fix is real and stays in, but the rainbow effect can still occur intermittently on any platform, not every time and not on every level — a second cause hasn't been found yet; see Known Issues.
• Automatic widescreen FOV scaling: the game now scales its field of view to match your display's aspect ratio automatically, instead of requiring the old manual FOV-scale slider. Toggle off in the F10 overlay (Widescreen Auto) if you prefer the original 4:3 framing. The scaled vertical FOV is clamped to a 20°–160° range as a guard against degenerate values on unusual aspect ratios. (This is FOV scaling, not a native 16:9 world/HUD re-render — see Known Issues.)
• TV overscan artifacts removed: the black bars top/bottom and the thin pixel strips left/right of the gameplay view are gone (D247/D246) — both were the original N64 TV-safe-area margin, invisible on a CRT under real overscan but visible on a PC monitor. New Video.SafeAreaCrop toggle (default on) if you want the original framing back.
• Two more crash fixes: a campaign-halting crash at the end of Control Center on 00 Agent difficulty, which would then crash on every subsequent relaunch until the save was reset (D295); and a crash selecting most save slots with Skip Intro enabled (D299).
• The elusive complete freeze is root-caused and fixed. Players had hit a total, non-self-recovering lockup (most recently when returning from Caverns to the intro screen) that was real but never reproduced on demand. It turned out to be a latent defect in the original game's own AI command stream — a record type the engine mis-measures, which our level-teardown timing can trigger and the N64 never presents. Fixed with a minimal change under the project's game-code exception process (D309/D310); a second, unrelated freeze mechanism found during the same playtest is now guarded as well (D311).
• A NULL-pointer guard was added around a save-data lookup that two players hit with an identical crash address (GitHub #87, D301) — this should close that crash, though we weren't able to reproduce the exact trigger condition ourselves to confirm it end-to-end.
• Facility's execution softlock is caught and recovered from: a rare race in the original game's own AI script (present on the N64 too) could leave Ourumov frozen mid-execution after Objective C, with no way out short of reloading. A port-side watchdog now detects the exact unrecoverable state and re-seeds the attack so the scene plays out as authored; it re-arms once the scene has cleared, so replaying Facility later in the same session is still covered (D318).
• A Steam Deck crash is fixed: an audio-thread bug could crash the game early in a level (sndHandleEvent's sound-preemption scan could dereference a pointer without checking it was valid first). Live-verified crash-free on real Steam Deck hardware, including with All unlocked toggled on.
• Mouse input and F10 controls fixed: mouse input was reworked to follow the Perfect Dark PC port's architecture — slow mouse motion is no longer barely recognized and fast motion no longer saturates almost immediately (D300, Input.MouseDirectLook, on by default). The separate aim-speed and turn-speed sliders — which could be set to inconsistent values against each other — are now a single Mouse sensitivity control with a wider range. Also fixed three F10 menu bugs found along the way: clicking a row could unexpectedly scroll the whole list, a click near certain rows could silently activate a different option than the one you clicked (most noticeably, clicking All unlocked could instead trigger Quit to desktop), and the panel's bottom row no longer duplicates whatever item is currently selected (D251).
• Random-number generation now matches the N64 original exactly (D284) — a shift-operation bug in the PRNG had desynced the PC's random stream from N64's since the very first release, affecting loot placement, AI variance, and other randomized elements. This changes the random sequence from every prior build, so old input recordings/replays will diverge, but your save files are unaffected: a migration shim automatically upgrades any save written by an older build the first time you load it (D297) — no manual action needed.
• Assorted texture/rendering fixes: an incorrect IA4 texture-format decode and an overly-tight near-plane portal-culling guard were both corrected (D266/D271) — reduces some texture-edge and visibility artifacts on affected levels.

Known issues

• The front-end Nintendo logo renders as two white blobs, and the Rareware logo is close but its texture filtering looks off (D75).
• Particle colors: a real fix landed this release, but the rainbow effect can still occur intermittently. One genuine, reproducible cause (an out-of-bounds vertex-buffer write in explosion rendering) is fixed. A second, still-unidentified cause remains, on both Windows and Steam Deck — it doesn't reproduce every time or on every level, so treat this as improved, not fully resolved (D252).
• Some muzzle flashes draw an extra, erroneous long flash straight up from the gun (seen on the M16, among others), on top of the normal, correctly drawn flash. Cosmetic only (D303).
• Surface 1: the 2D billboard trees near the start render as a solid wall of tree texture instead of discrete sprites (D236). Under active investigation across ten+ passes; no fix yet.
• No native widescreen render: v0.3.0's automatic FOV scaling (above) expands the field of view for 16:9+ displays, but the world geometry and HUD are still authored/laid out for 4:3 — this is not yet a true edge-to-edge 16:9 render.
• No controller rebinding UI, and no macOS or ARM builds.
• Distant geometry can drop out on the biggest open levels (Streets, Egyptian) at default FOV — a culling/LOD issue that sometimes self-corrects as you keep moving (D249).
• Gunshot SFX can sound off during sustained/rapid fire: cadence can drift from the N64 original's rate, and PP7/AK47 fire can occasionally go silent under heavy automatic fire near another looping sound (e.g. an alarm klaxon) (D240/D241).
• All unlocked is highly experimental — do not enable it until you have at least one save written. Complete a level normally first (e.g. Dam on Agent), then turn the toggle on. Enabling it on a brand-new install with no prior save can still cause silent audio and odd right-mouse-aim behavior (D259/D257). (The Steam Deck crash fix above addresses a separate, now-fixed symptom that had also been associated with All unlocked use; this audio/aim caveat is unrelated and still open.)
• Water on IsWater levels shows a moving seam between two patterns (D245).
• Occasional z-fighting on some levels' geometry (D308) — a Dam intro/ truck-wheel instance showing odd transparent-looking areas has also been seen and may be related (D306). Minor, cosmetic; not investigated for this release.
• In-level security camera props can occasionally end up facing backwards (the wrong direction) on some levels, seen on Bunker — this is the gameplay security-camera object, not the player's own view (D307). Not investigated for this release.
• A rare, self-clearing visual quirk: on an occasional animation transition, Bond's model can briefly render out of place. It has no effect on gameplay or your save, and it clears on its own or by re-entering the level; a safeguard added this release guarantees it can never affect game stability (D311).
• Two collision oddities found in final playtesting: throwable items (mines, grenades) can occasionally clip through walls in certain spots (D312), and bullet impacts don't appear on some surfaces — doors and windows are unaffected (D313). Both are queued for the next release; if you hit either, an issue with the level and spot helps a lot.

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 prepare-assets tool. No ROM, no game assets. The Windows bundle carries its runtime DLLs; the Linux bundle carries SDL2, so on both platforms nothing needs to be installed first.

Running it

You supply your own GoldenEye 007 N64 ROM (.z64, big-endian) that you legally own: the NTSC-U (US) release is what this build supports (PAL / JP are on the roadmap). No Python, no toolchain, nothing to install.

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 run takes a few extra seconds: it detects your ROM, generates the two derived asset folders (data/pcmodels-ntsc-final/, data/pccg-ntsc-final/) once, and saves them for every future run. (The generator is prepare-assets/ge007-convert inside the bundle; you can also run it manually; it prints what it's doing.)

Steam Deck: sideload the unpacked folder (USB or a file manager), do steps 2–3, then add the executable to Games → Add Game as a non-Steam game.

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. No keyboard needed.

Full steps 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

Source & docs

https://github.com/jkdansereau/goldeneye-pc-port, built on the GoldenEye 007 decompilation, architecture after 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 — as much a study of what agentic development gets wrong on a game-sized codebase as it is a port. See the README's Background section for the full account.