Dusklight – GC Twilight Princess Decompiled | Hacker News Reader

Dusklight – GC Twilight Princess Decompiled

twilitrealm.dev

121 pointsshepherdjerred21 comments

This isn't just a decompilation, this is a full port. Even supports Android.

Genuine question: Once a room is fully decompiled is it not in a playable state on another platform until it is ported?

Yes in theory if you decompile a game then it should compile back to the original platform and generate the exactly same ROM

You'd then have to modify the source code to port it to other platforms

For whatever reason I never got around to playing Twilight Princess when it came out. I think I was at college and the family Wii was still at home, so there was never time during summer/winter breaks. I've been meaning to check it out for some years, so I'm actually really excited with the progress on this, since it looks to be leaps and bounds over just playing it in Dolphin.

I'll probably wait another month or so before starting a new file in earnest. There are new releases every few days, and I'd like to see all the potential game-breaking bugs fixed first.

I'm anxiously awaiting support for using dumps from the HD Wii U version since that's what I have in my own collection(and dumping on the Wii U is remarkably easy with the built in browser.)

That's unlikely to happen any time soon, to the best of my knowledge the files between the two are largely different enough to prevent it. The Wii version is a Maybe.

I doubt anyone will be doing that as this decompilation exists and ports include the improvements from the HD version

Delighted to see a "brew install dusklight" option.

Curious how this is different from a generalized emulator. Wouldn't this be able to run any GC game that used the same registers as Twilight Princess?

This project was made possible by the recent ZeldaRET decompilation project. To simplify, the goal of that project was to create a program whose inputs were the game assets (extracted from a ROM) and to produce ROM output that just happens to be an exact match of the source ROM. In other words, the decompilation project re-implemented all game logic.

Dusklight is a program based on the decompiled source code that requires game assets then runs the application natively. It’s highly specialized and would likely never be used to run any other game.

Why would they reimplement the game logic if they've decompiled the game code? I genuinely do not understand!

Why would they decompile the game if they can implement the game logic?

Sorry, the "re-implemented" wording might have been a bit strong in my last comment.

Take a look at this recent pull request into the TP decompilation repo: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp/pull/3155/changes

The changes are often symbol renames, casts, replacing hard-coded values with enum values, etc...The idea is to map the decompiled output to human-readable source.

Does anyone happen to have an explainer article handy or some background on the boom in “decompilations?” There’s this and I also saw something about Cool Boarders 2…

Why this method of uprezzing? Why now?

AI has made it much easier, basically.

It had been done here and there in some cases, but now it can be applied as a general thing to many projects.

That’s probably true, but I hope not. Decompiling works because fair use copyright law allows it. Decompiling with AI is not creative and I doubt would stand up in court as transformative.

These kinds of hobby projects either successfully hide from Nintendo's legal threats or exist at their leisure, anyhow. Fair use arguments mean relatively little to them, and no-one doing this kind of thing has the money to stand up to them.

Great for the people who like Twilight Princess, I guess. Personally, I have very mixed feelings about Twilight Princess. I remember the years long hype since its first announcement, I remember the hype around the Wii launch. This was the first game I bought for the Wii. I remember being blown away by it, thinking it was totally worth the wait.

But as time went on I came to realize that it was a hot mess to the point where I had to force myself to finish it. The gameplay itself was fine, as with most Nintendo games, but the content was a hodgepodge of parts that did not fit together. The story was building up this grand mystery with an all new villain, but then none of it went anywhere and halfway through the game the developers just threw in the towel and went "lol, it's Ganondorf again, to save the princess".

The items were mostly just "keys" used for very specific situations and just server to overcome obstacles which were specifically crafted to give those items a purpose (the spinning top being the worst offender).

The wolf mechanic was not really worth using, it was just a worse gameplay experience, so the wolf form was something just to be used when it was forced upon the player. You enter an area, it's all twilight and you turn into a wolf, then you go and collect all the light bugs, turn the area back to normal, and then you can finally play the game proper.

The game was aiming for a more realistic and gritty style after the backlash from Wind Waker, which is what many people wanted. But then they put all those goofy disproportionate character models in the game. It's as if Nintendo really wanted to make a new Wind Waker, but then reskinned the models with realistic and gritty textures. The end result is worse than if they had just made another Wind Waker style game. (and I did not even mind Wind Waker personally, but I do get where people are coming from)

The almost-open world design looked cool the first time around, but the world was just empty. There was hardly anything interesting to do. The same for the dungeons. There are no real puzzles that make you think in the game either, it's just gimmicks and chores.

I think this was the last time I gaslighted myself into liking a game. I had paid 250€ plus 60 € for that game, so of course it had to be good. It wasn't, but it took time to admit it. Since then I have taken a more critical stance towards video games: if it's not fun there is no point in forcing myself through it, I'll just drop it and eat the loss. It's better to wast money than waste both time and money.

Is Twilight Princess a bad game? Not really, there are worse offenders. If you have nothing better it's serviceable, but it just makes me want to play another game. Is it the worst Zelda? No, at least not for me; that time goes to Spirit Tracks, the game that irreparably made me give up on future Zelda forever.

I always felt TP fell between two stools; it had to be modified and changed to become a Wii launch title and the direction was fractured because of that.

Had it been the last great GameCube title I think it would have at least been more consistent.

Wow I’m surprised you had such a negative opinion! It’s one of my favorites (tied with Ocarina).

I loved the music, graphics, and darker themes.

I remember being greatly annoyed you couldn’t skip the train rides.

I love Twilight Princess because of this dichotomy. Yes it has all the flaws you have mentioned, but it also suggests at what a Zelda game could look like in an era where people thought that the Zelda series was Nintendo's competitor to games like Shadow of Colossus, ICO, Drakengard, Legend of Kain of the era.

Ultimately, Nintendo realized that that's not the way they want to take the IP. They wanted game-play to feel timeless and take a priority, and the narrative to take a backseat.

It's was definitely the right choice and revived the IP, but despite it's technical excellence and dynamic game-play I can not get into the latest entries.

It's a shame you did not like Spirit Tracks. I found the puzzles to actually be interesting and the boss battles to be the most exhilarating in the series - with a good soundtrack to boot.

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