perfect_dark/README.md
Ryan Dwyer 23b6bd2643 Restructure build workflow
* All segments are now extracted from the base ROM; the base ROM is no
longer a compile time dependency
* ROM segments are now positioned relatively to each rather than with
hard coded addresses
* Piracy checksums are calculated during build
2020-08-25 20:40:35 +10:00

2.2 KiB

Perfect Dark Decompilation (WIP)

This repository contains a work-in-progress decompilation of Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64.

Status

See the Perfect Dark Decompilation Status Page.

Installation Requirements

  • make
  • mips build tools (Debian/Ubuntu: binutils-mips-linux-gnu, Arch: mips64-elf-binutils from AUR)
  • Python 3

ROM Versions

Perfect Dark has six known versions:

ROM ID Description
ntsc-final NTSC 8.7 final - fully supported
ntsc-1.0 NTSC 8.7 final (the initial, buggy release) - fully supported
ntsc-beta NTSC 6.4 beta - can extract assets only
pal-final PAL 8.7 final - can extract assets only
pal-beta PAL 28.7 beta - can extract assets only
jap-final Japanese 8.7 final - can extract assets only

Currently only the ntsc-final and ntsc-1.0 versions are fully supported. The NTSC beta, PAL and JAP versions can have their assets extracted from the base ROM but no effort has been made to build those versions back into a ROM.

The project uses the $ROMID environment variable to know which version to work with. If not set, it defaults to ntsc-final. You can change it by running something like export ROMID=ntsc-1.0.

Extracting the base ROM

Before you do anything you need an existing ROM to extract assets from.

  1. Save your existing ROM file into the root of the repository with the name pd.ntsc-final.z64. It should not be byteswapped (the first four bytes should be 0x80371240).
  2. Run make extract. This will create an extracted/ntsc-final directory containing assets from your ROM.

Compiling

  • Run make rom to build the ROM. The ROM will be written to build/ntsc-final/pd.z64.

How do I know the built files are matching?

Run make followed by make test. If make test produces no output then all compiled segments are matching.

You can also md5sum your base ROM with the built ROM and check they have the same hash: md5sum pd.ntsc-final.z64 build/ntsc-final/pd.z64.