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Gaming Port Guides

This is a wiki that I'm going to use to share gaming information with friends, family or other people who might need it. This is also a fun side project to learn how to use mkdocs.

Most of this wiki is about Source Ports — people creating methods of playing older games on newer or alternate platforms. In most cases, these source ports contain new or different options to change the experience; this can be used to fix bugs, add more challenge, or just smooth over things that players found annoying.

My guides:

Nintendo 64 Ports

PC Ports

Each page includes a guide to install the source port on Windows 10, but the process is often the same on different platforms like MacOS or Linux. Images can be clicked on to open them in a lightbox. All image banners for game pages have been found through SteamGridDB, a great resource for game art; otherwise, images are my own screenshots.

Port Information

All ports aren't created equal. Some have different quirks related to them. Some games may have long-running source ports, but most of the Nintendo 64 games I've included here use one of two methods:

Ship of Harkinian

Ship of Harkinian is a team that is developing PC ports for Nintendo 64 games. They choose which games to make ports for.

They typically are a bit less user-friendly, but offer a greater amount of features and customization. For example, their Ocarina of Time port has a built-in Randomizer.

Ship of Harkinian has ports available for:

Recompilations

When I call something a "recompilation" it's a shortform for a much more involved process.

  1. Typically, games need to be decompiled into their source code, so people can modify it. This is usually done by a team of people.
  2. A second team will then turn it into a recompiled port, so a modern system can run it. This is usually done by a separate team of people, as the skillset is different.

The problem is, decompilation can take years, and if a team doesn't take up the project of making a recompilation, a project can stall.

Recently, a tool was made to make decompilation and recompilation — specifically for Nintendo 64 games — easier and more automated. However, there is still fine-tuning to be done, so recompilations still need to be made "by hand"; they just can be made a lot easier now.

A YouTuber named Nerrel has a great video about decompilation/recompilation below:

A list of completed recompilations are:

  • Zelda 64 (both Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time) - only Majora's Mask is complete for now
  • Banjo-Kazooie