Following the team’s impressive The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time decompilation project, developer Harbour Masters is working on a Perfect Dark PC port via similar means.
Harbour Masters’ Ocarina of Time PC port drew headlines everywhere for legally reverse engineering the Nintendo game, allowing fans to play the game natively on modern hardware.
In a post on the developer’s Discord channel, the reverse engineering team revealed that a Perfect Dark PC port is officially in the works. While the project is currently without a release date, progress is going well.
Developer Kenix revealed that work on the PC project has been going on for “a little under a year”. The Perfect Dark project has been in an “on and off” state, but work has started to pick up in recent weeks.
“I do not have any ETA on the release of it,” Kenix told followers. “I can say that work has picked up in the past month. We’ll see how it goes.”
Harbour Masters’ Zelda PC port was achieved by reverse engineering the Nintendo 64 game and creating a conversion tool to avoid any legal issues. Dubbed Ship of Harkinian, the tool asks users to input their own Nintendo 64 rom and convert it to a full PC port.
This allows Habour Masters to avoid one of the biggest issues with creating PC ports of games: IP ownership. Using the Ship of Harkinian tool, fans provide their own assets, bypassing the biggest fear of fan ports to new platforms for games that don’t have publicly available source code.
Other Nintendo 64 games that have made the jump to PC include Super Mario 64. However, while the game’s PC port is excellent, it wasn’t developed in the same way as Harbour Masters’ efforts. This has resulted in numerous DMCA takedowns from Nintendo, making the port harder to find.
Currently owned by Microsoft, the Perfect Dark series is expected to have a renaissance. With a new studio working on an Xbox-exclusive Perfect Dark reboot, the series could be big once again.