Zelda 64 Deconstructed
Posted by inpheaux on October 4th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
I love easter eggs. I especially love easter eggs that require INTENSE amounts of digging. By extension, I have a great amount of respect for those dedicated few ROM hackers we have out there. These are the guys who spend all their time pouring over debugger logs, probing memory locations, seeking out unreferenced material in the swirling mass that is a full compiled game ROM. It's a pretty thankless job being a ROM hacker, since most of the time all they uncover is some broken empty room, or an untextured model, or what have you. Sometimes, though, they hit the weirdness jackpot.
Nintendo games, especially those from the N64 era, were chock full of this stuff. Rare was well known for hiding all kinds of crazy stuff in their game. Go read up on some of the hidden stuff in the Banjo Kazooie games if you're interested. It was rather uncommon to find something actually hidden in a game from Nintendo proper, but sure, it happened every once in awhile.
Well, over the weekend two enterprising hackers - Cendamos and JaytheHam - released some stuff they've apparently been working on for awhile: an extensive list of all actors in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. This might look like a bunch of meaningless words and memory addresses if you don't really know what you're looking at, so let me clarify: this is a list of damn near every object in the game, referenced or not, with the addresses needed to make it show up in the game. Items, characters, enemies, architecture, everything. Because we now know them all, we can swap stuff around using N64 emulators and their built in GameShark/GameGenie/ProActionReplay/etc features, and spawn anything you want anywhere.
This is a massive accomplishment on it's own, since it means that now if you really want to you can spawn Volvagia in the middle of a town. But what's better is all the crazy unreferenced stuff they found in the whole list of actors - like an Arwing.
For reasons we may never know, there's a StarFox 64 Arwing - complete with AI - left around unreferenced in the Ocarina of Time ROM file. You'll need a certain version of the ROM (which, of course, we won't be providing links to) and an emulator with a built-in GameShark feature, but after that it's pretty straight forward. You'll get to take down an Arwing with a boomerang.
If that sounds like too much effort for you, or if you don't believe this, we've mirrored a video of it in action. It was edited at the end for great comedic effect, but the actual Arwing flying around is real. There's also some screenshots of other assorted weirdness made possible by this list in the forum thread linked above, so go check it out. Oh, and Do a Barrel Roll.
Discuss this article on the forums.