Setup Guide

• Setup Guide
  • Prerequisites
  • Install dependencies
    • A. Linux / WSL / VM
    • B. Docker
    • C. Docker Compose
  • Usage
    • Recompile IDO
    • Extract assets from base rom(s)
    • Build the ROM
  • In-depth build process
    • Requirements
    • Environment
    • C Compiler
    • Assembly Preprocessor
    • Code build process
    • Asset/data build process
    • Building the final ROM

Prerequisites

• clone this repository to a directory of your choosing
• place an unmodified copy of your existing NTSC (US) ROM inside the root of this repository with the name baserom.u.z64
  • optionally: if you want to extract assets from NTSC (JP) or PAL (EU), additionally place baserom.j.z64 and baserom.e.z64 into the root dir

Install dependencies

You can choose one of the following installation methods to get all needed dependencies.

A. Linux / WSL / VM

Install build dependencies

The requirements for Debian / Ubuntu should be:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install binutils-mips-linux-gnu make git python3

If you don’t have host development tools already installed then you will also need to install build-essential:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Note: libcapstone-dev/pkg-config are no longer required. Older versions of this repo’s recompiled IDO toolchain (tools/ido5.3_recomp, see Recompile IDO below) linked against the system libcapstone library for MIPS disassembly. The current toolchain vendors its own disassembly library (rabbitizer) instead, so there’s nothing extra to install for it beyond the compiler already covered by build-essential above.

Additionally, qemu-irix is needed. Download the package to a desired location and install with:

sudo dpkg -i qemu-irix-2.11.0-2169-g32ab296eef_amd64.deb

B. Docker

• change directory to the cloned repo
• build the docker image: docker build -t goldeneye .
• connect to the container: docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/home/dev goldeneye (alternatively, replace $(pwd) with the absolute path of your directory)

C. Docker Compose

• run and connect to shell in project root: docker-compose run ge007 bash

Alternatively, you can start the container with docker compose up and connect to the container in e.g. docker desktop

Usage

Recompile IDO

This project can compile the ROM’s C code in one of two ways, controlled by the IDO_RECOMP build option (see Build the ROM):

• IDO_RECOMP=YES (the default) — uses tools/ido5.3_recomp/cc, a copy of the original SGI IRIX 5.3 IDO compiler that has been statically recompiled into a native x86-64 Linux program. Since it runs directly on your machine instead of under an emulator, it’s noticeably faster to compile with — this is why the setup step below exists.
• IDO_RECOMP=NO — runs the original, unmodified IRIX IDO binaries (tools/irix/root/usr/bin/cc etc.) under the qemu-irix user-mode emulator instead. Slower, but useful as a lower-risk reference if you ever suspect the recompiled toolchain is misbehaving.

The IRIX IDO binaries are not distributed with this repository. They are proprietary SGI software and only ever ran on IRIX/MIPS. Neither tools/irix/ nor tools/SGIImageViewer.exe is committed here; the PC port does not need them at all (asset extraction uses tools/extractor, and the port itself builds with CMake + your host compiler). You only need the IDO toolchain to build the actual N64 ROM or to regenerate tools/ido5.3_recomp. To get it: obtain the IDO 5.3 tree from an IRIX 5.3 installation, from decompals/ido-static-recomp (which documents where its input binaries come from), or from the N64 decompilation community, and place it at tools/irix/root/ (with cc etc. under tools/irix/root/usr/bin/). tools/SGIImageViewer.exe is an optional convenience only.

The recompiled toolchain isn’t checked into git — it’s generated locally the first time it’s needed, from the original IDO binaries in tools/irix/root (see the note above on obtaining those). A plain make from the repo root builds it automatically if it’s missing (wired up via tools/Makefile), so most people never need to run this step by hand. To build it explicitly (e.g. to watch its own build output, or force a rebuild after changing it):

cd tools/ido5.3_recomp
make

For what this toolchain actually is, where it comes from upstream, and how to update it to a newer version, see tools/ido5.3_recomp/README.md.

Be careful! If you previously compiled GoldenEye on a different operating system or CPU architecture, the binaries (gzip, n64cksum) that were compiled will be incompatible. You must delete them.

There may be a “dubious ownership” error from Git, and it may say it fails to detect the Git repository. Run git status to see how to fix it.

Extract assets from base rom(s)

• to have the files in correct location, see prerequisites

To extract the NTSC (US) base rom assets run the following from root directory:

./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh

Extracting NTSC (US) base rom assets is mandatory before extracting NTSC (JP) or PAL (EU) assets.

To extract the NTSC (JP) base rom assets run the following from root directory:

./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh && ./scripts/extract_diff.j.sh

To extract the PAL (EU) base rom assets run the following from root directory:

./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh && ./scripts/extract_diff.e.sh

Other options to extract base rom assets or extract diff:

./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh /path_to/rom.n64 # ROM in another directory
./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh /mnt/e/Goldeneye.n64 # ROM located on EverDrive
./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh files # Extract files only
./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh images # Extract images only

Note: If you are upgrading from an old repository, run:

./scripts/clean_baserom.sh && ./scripts/extract_baserom.u.sh && make clean

Build the ROM

Run make from root directory to build the ROM (defaults to VERSION=US).

make

If all goes well, resulting artifacts can be found in the build directory and the following text should be printed:

build/u/ge007.u.z64: OK

Other examples:

make VERSION=JP -j4       # build NTSC (JP) version instead with 4 jobs
make VERSION=EU COMPARE=0 # build PAL (EU) version but do not compare ROM hashes

The full list of configurable variables are listed below, with the default being the first listed:

• VERSION: US, JP, EU
• COMPARE: 1 (compare ROM hash), 0 (do not compare ROM hash)
• IDO_RECOMP: YES (build with IDO recomp), NO (build using qemu-irix)
• FINAL: YES (builds final version with -O2 optimization), NO (debug)
• VERBOSE: 0 (quiet), 1

Additional documentation of the build process can be found in the next section.

In-depth build process

This section explains the details of the build process.

Requirements

It is required that qemu-irix be installed and available.

Environment

The build uses the US version by default. Available options are US, EU, and JP. For example

make clean VERSION=JP
make VERSION=JP

C Compiler

The c compiler can be found in tools/irix/root/usr/bin/cc. This splits the compilation process into several steps.

• cfe: compiler front end
• uopt: ?
• ugen: ?

Assembly Preprocessor

GLOBAL_ASM is retired in this repository, so no asm preprocessor step is used during normal builds. Source .c files are compiled directly by the IRIX compiler.

Code build process

src and src/game: .c and .s files are compiled into .o files

src/libultra: .c and .s files are compiled into .o files

Asset/data build process

Before compilation begins, assets are converted into .c files. This file is then compiled using the c compiler in the usual manner. Once an .o file exists, it is converted to an .elf file using the toolchain -ld program, and a .ld file specification explaining where the ELF sections should be arranged in the file (and also which sections to exclude). The toolchain -objcopy program is then used to dump the data in the .elf file into a similar .bin file.

The .bin file is then compressed using the standard compression program to produce a .rz file.

For compilation, having a .c file is not necessary as long the correct .bin file is available. This can be created from the extract script.

Each obseg asset category has its own Makefile in the obseg folder.

Once the .rz files exist for an asset category, they can be bundled together into an .o file. All obseg assets are bundled in assets/obseg/ob_seg.s and music is bundled in assets/music/music.s.

Building the final ROM

Once all code and assets are compiled into .o files, these are combined into one .elf file. The layout of the object files is given by the ge007.*.ld files in the root of the project. For a list of individual methods, assets, and files see the map file in build/[uje]/ge007.*.map (where * is the country code, u, e, or j).

The toolchain -objcopy program is then used to create the bundled .bin of the entire ROM.

The final step is to run the tools/n64cksum program on the .bin file to create the final .z64.