This recompilation is a byproduct of developing gbarecomp — the games are the proving ground, the framework is the goal. These are in-development previews, not finished ports — expect rough edges, and depth will keep landing over months, not days. My time for any one title is limited, so I ask for your patience. Contributions are welcome — testing, issues, and PRs to the game or framework all help and will accelerate this game's polish. More on the why at: Recomp + AI: 5 Months Later »
Static recompilation of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Game Boy Advance)
to native PC, built on the gbarecomp
framework. Minish Cap is gbarecomp's original target and the most mature of the
GBA recomps here.
This is a static-recompilation base + runner, not a finished port. It boots through the BIOS intro to the title screen and into gameplay — overworld, dialogue, and save states round-trip. It is the most-complete GBA title in this collection, but still early: not every code path is statically recompiled, and content is not exhaustively tested.
It gets better the more you play. Any code path the static recompiler hasn't covered runs through a built-in interpreter the first time it's hit, then is JIT-compiled to native (in-process, no toolchain needed) and remembered on disk — so the next launch runs it natively from the start. Interpreted once, native ever after; coverage grows toward fully-native as the game is played. See How it self-improves.
The ROM's ARM7TDMI machine code is statically translated to native C — every
function the game runs becomes a real generated C function. Unlike most recomp
projects, the GBA BIOS is recompiled and executed too (not HLE'd or stubbed),
so the boot sequence and interrupt/SWI handlers run as real recompiled code. The
rest of the console — the PPU (graphics), APU + M4A sound engine, DMA, timers, the
cartridge EEPROM save chip, and hardware I/O — is modeled by the gbarecomp
runtime.
Only symbol metadata (function names, addresses, sizes) from the
zeldaret/tmc decompilation enters this repo —
never its C source, PC-port runner, or toolchain. The ROM is never
redistributed; you supply your own legally-dumped copy.
| Target | Game | ROM (USA) | SHA-1 | Debug port |
|---|---|---|---|---|
MinishCapRecomp |
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap | USA | b4bd50e4131b027c334547b4524e2dbbd4227130 |
19842 |
The runtime refuses to launch on an unrecognized ROM — the SHA-1 must match.
Save chip: EEPROM. (Other regions can be added by checksum in config/<region>.toml.)
- Download the latest
MinishCapRecomp-windows-x64zip from Releases and extract it (or build from source — see below). - Run
MinishCapRecomp. - Supply your own legally-obtained Minish Cap (USA) ROM when prompted. The path is cached next to the exe for future launches.
- Play. Early on you may briefly see the interpreter warm up new code paths; once warmed (and cached), they run native.
| GBA button | Keyboard |
|---|---|
| D-Pad | Arrow keys |
| A | Z |
| B | X |
| L / R | A / S |
| Start | Enter |
| Select | Backspace |
Save states: Shift+F1–F9 save to a slot, F1–F9 load it.
The faithful default remains 240x160. Open Mods in the pre-boot launcher
and enable Adaptive Widescreen to opt into the game-specific extended view.
The feature is disabled by default and persists independently in
mods/state.toml; old --resize-view, game.toml, and environment settings
do not bypass the mod's ROM and plugin validation.
This is intentionally different from Mega Man Zero's fixed-width modes. The window still opens at the native 3:2 size. As its aspect ratio becomes wider, the logical framebuffer widens from 240 up to 480 pixels while remaining 160 pixels tall, revealing additional world on both sides of the original camera. At 3:2 the literal native renderer is used; a typical 21:9 fullscreen display requests roughly 373x160. Resizing to a larger window with the same 3:2 aspect only scales the native image and does not reveal more world.
The side margins read Minish Cap's complete rendered room-layer buffers rather than the GBA's wrapping 32x32 hardware tilemap, so authored scenery continues without repeating. An actual room edge clears naturally where no adjacent room pixels exist. The gameplay HUD follows the physical corners as the view changes width, while dialogue remains centered over the native play area. Entities, scripted triggers, other screen-space effects, and the hardware OAM limit retain original behavior, so they can pop in or assume the 240-pixel viewport. Disable the mod to return to faithful presentation.
Zelda 1 foreign-world hidden checkpoint
This is a developer-only hidden checkpoint, not a player-facing feature.
Release builds and release catalogs contain neither the Zelda manifest nor its
plugin/foreign-world runtime, so recreating or installing a manifest cannot
activate it. Developers must explicitly configure
-DMINISH_ENABLE_ZELDA1_FOREIGN_WORLD=ON to stage the separate checkpoint.
That build requires the user's exact 131,088-byte The Legend of Zelda (USA,
PRG0) iNES image, SHA-1 dab79c84934f9aa5db4e7dad390e5d0c12443fa2. The
runtime fails closed before direct, bounded in-memory extraction—like the
Samus approach—and no ROM or derived Zelda content is shipped. A persistent
Falcon-style extracted-asset cache remains future work and is not required for
this hidden checkpoint.
The disabled-by-default developer Zelda 1 Foreign World package requires and hash-validates that user-owned Zelda 1 USA PRG0 iNES image before its trusted plugin can run. The current entrance is the visible rift in the white-flower patch left of Link's house in South Hyrule Field (area 3, room 1). Walk onto it to enter; no action button is required. It arms only after a safe outside sample, so loading or returning with Link already overlapping it cannot enter unexpectedly. The temporary explicit exit remains Up + Down + Left + Right after releasing the D-pad once in Zelda. The complete source-mapped readiness gate rejects transitions, scripts, dialogue, unavailable normal control, and hidden or dead Link states.
Inside the foreign world, ordinary D-pad input advances the host-owned Zelda position once per Minish source frame through decoded Zelda terrain collision and screen edges. The existing Player-only movement hook suppresses native-map coordinate movement while active; it never writes guest coordinates. The PPU instead applies a bounded data-only focus transform to Link's existing Minish OBJ, preserving his native animation, items, sword behavior, OBJ ordering, windows, and color effects over the decoded 240x160 BGR555 terrain.
The current playable vertical slice includes source-backed overworld rooms, the
OW77 Old Man/sword cave, four source-rostered red Octoroks in OW66, and a
source-room route through First Quest Level 1 to six-HP Aquamentus. The start
cave dialogue reveals and completes on its source six-frame cadence. After it
finishes, walk onto the sword to acquire the exact Zelda1/01 record; no action
button is required. A compatible sword already present in durable inventory is
reconciled idempotently with the cave source instead of leaving an
uncollectible respawn. Native and Zelda-origin items remain distinct, and
either origin's selected sword can be used by the implemented foreign-world
combat adapters. Native and Zelda resource pools are also kept separate.
Injecting Zelda-origin item behavior back into ordinary Minish Cap rooms still
awaits a source-proven guest equipment boundary.
Deterministic QA routes from the initial OW $77 position are expressed as
held D-pad source frames: the start cave is Left 64, Up 64; OW $66 is
Up 232, Left 128; and the Level 1 portal is
Up 231, Left 1, Up 24, Left 7, Up 8, Left 1, Up 152, Left 7, Up 8, Left 1, Up 152, Right 1, Up 8, Left 1, Up 73, Right 1. In the start cave, wait for the
dialogue to finish, then move Up 21 and Right 8 onto the source sword hotspot.
Move down to source Y $DD and take one more Down step to return to OW $77.
This is still an engineering QA slice, not a finished port. Octoroks, drops, Aquamentus, and dungeon items use conspicuous host QA markers where NES metasprites or drop semantics have not yet been decoded. Level 1 currently uses a documented bounded intra-room movement policy, and only the implemented rooms, cave, enemy roster, and dungeon route should be treated as playable. The compositor deliberately preserves Minish OBJ/window/color-effect rules; those guest effects can occlude tiny source cave sprites in a live frame even though the direct source renderer and pickup collision retain them. The exact QA movement counts above remain the reliable temporary interaction guide. Trusted snapshot state covers the cross-world inventory and live overworld, cave, and OW66 combat record; ordinary Minish save-file sidecar attachment and the final return-portal/NPC UI remain later integration work.
gbarecomp's coverage is honest: a path that wasn't statically recompiled is
bridged through the interpreter the first time, loudly, then healed:
- First hit: the interpreter runs the missed function (correct, just not native) and the runtime records it.
- Heal: the function is JIT-compiled to native in-process via a toolchain-less backend (sljit) — no compiler required on your machine.
- Persist: the healed path is written to a per-ROM cache
(
recomp_cache/<rom-sha1>/), so the next launch re-JITs it up front and it runs native from the start.
The result is a game that converges toward fully-native execution the more it's
played, and stays improved across launches. A handful of instruction patterns
the JIT can't lower yet stay on the interpreter (precision over recall); those are
emitter gaps that close over time. Self-improvement is on by default; set
GBARECOMP_SELFHEAL_RECOMPILE=0 for a pure-interpreter run.
Prerequisites (Windows): MSYS2 with the mingw64
toolchain (gcc/g++), CMake 3.16+, Ninja, and SDL2 (mingw64 package). Builds
are invoked from PowerShell with the mingw64 toolchain on PATH.
1. Clone this repo next to gbarecomp (it builds against the sibling engine
checkout on main):
git clone https://github.com/mstan/gbarecomp.git
git clone https://github.com/mstan/MinishCapRecomp.git
cd MinishCapRecomp
2. Supply your ROM at roms/minishcap_usa.gba (SHA-1 above). ROMs are
gitignored and never committed.
3. Recompile + build. The committed symbols/ map is the importer output, so
you can regenerate the C and build directly:
# from PowerShell, mingw64 on PATH
gba_recompile --rom roms/minishcap_usa.gba --config symbols/minishcap.toml --out generated
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DGBARECOMP_ROOT=../gbarecomp
cmake --build build --target MinishCapRecomp
(gba_recompile is built from the gbarecomp checkout; see that repo's README.)
The recompiler emits deterministic parallel translation units; current
gbarecomp also rejects the retired monolithic recompiled.cpp output.
This project contains no copyrighted ROM data, no Nintendo BIOS, and no decomp source — only original recompiler/runtime code and symbol metadata. You must supply your own legally-dumped ROM (and BIOS, where the runtime requires one). The Legend of Zelda and The Minish Cap are trademarks of Nintendo; this project is an unaffiliated, non-commercial preservation and research effort.
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