@xianc78 also considering this is DK64, fat chance of it happening

@coolboymew There is a team on GitHub that is decompiling multiple N64 games along with SDKs. I think they're aiming to create a decomp for at least every first and second party N64 game. We already have disassemblies for nearly every NES and SNES game, so I think every major game for N64 (and onward) is going to get a decompilation in some form.

https://github.com/n64decomp

@xianc78 There's more than 5 N64 games... or is there something I'm not seeing?

@coolboymew They're just getting started. Super Mario 64 appears to be the only complete decomp and they are still working on the two Zelda games and the two Rare shooters. They also have decomps of the code libraries used by the N64. I think eventually they will have at least every first and second party N64 game decompiled.

@xianc78 you made it seem like there was a decompilation project for all major N64. I should be seeing at least 30 projects

@coolboymew It's going to take awhile. Decompiling code is hard since the decompiled code doesn't have meaningful names for variables, objects etc. You need to learn what each variable, object, function is supposed to do and then rename it to something that makes sense. It took at least a year to create a full, readable decomp of SM64.

Plus, they don't have full decomps for many of the system libraries, so it could take years until we have full decomps of all the major N64 games unless more people join the project which I think is going to happen because there seems to be a recent surge of people wanting to know the inner workings of their favorite childhood games.

@coolboymew Even with the expansion pak, the game will still crash after around 10 hours (really only a problem if you are playing with save states). And it is still theoretically possible to bypass the no-expanison pak detected screen with gameshark codes, so we can see if the game really made use of the expansion pak and see how frequent these memory leaks happen.

@xianc78 Yeah, but wouldn't someone have done it by now tho'?

@coolboymew I don't know that much about GameShark, but I heard it took years to find a way to load Citadel from Goldeneye using it. I could imagine the same for this. And I think the story with the expansion pak came from a recent-ish interview, so someone might be working on it as we speak.

@xianc78 Isn't Citadel that removed level? I think the main issue there was loading the level without having to deal with constant crashing. As far as I've heard, N64 hacking is a bitch, altho' with the crazy Mario 64 editors and hack coming out, there has to be some sort of advancement there?

But still, that has to be way harder than skipping the expansion pak check

@coolboymew I almost never hear of DK64 hacking, so I expect the hacking community to be small compared to Goldeneye's hacking community which is probably at the levels of modding communities of most PC games at this point.

And even with a huge hacking community it still takes years to access or bypass something like the DK64 expansion-pak check. For example, the PAL and iQue versions of SM64 has a crash debugger that still nobody knows how to access. (The decomp is the NTSC version which lacks this debugger)