Ocarina of Time - Spaceworld '97 "Experience" released (ROM hack)

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A group of enthusiasts known as the sw97-team have attempted to recreate the renowned Ocarina of Time demo that was made playable to attendees of the 1997 Nintendo Space World event.

Using known video footage from the event as well as leaked content from one of the recent Nintendo gigaleaks, the team have today released their project which can either be patched onto an existing compatible ROM file or built from scratch alongside the Ocarina of Time decompilation project.

The project aims to be as faithful to the target demo as possible but as the team have stated - 100% accuracy is impossible. They have compiled a list with more details for those looking for specifics.

You can watch the trailer of the Spaceworld '97 Experience below and follow the links to find out more.

To celebrate both the anniversary of Ocarina of Time and Spaceworld 1997, today we are finally releasing Ocarina of Time - Spaceworld ‘97 Experience! We are very thankful to all of you for patiently waiting through this long development cycle and excited for you to finally experience what we have worked so hard on!

This project aims to be a mostly accurate representation of the Nintendo Spaceworld 1997 demo of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Since this project aims to restore an experience that was originally a demo, it cannot be completed from start-to-finish like the final game. Instead, three gameplay "tours" featured in the original Spaceworld 1997 demo are available to choose from, each showcasing various unique flavors of gameplay.

In early 2021, a 32 MB development cartridge of F-Zero X was discovered and dumped by Forest of Illusion, a well known video game preservationist. F-Zero X is only a 16 MB game, so half of that 32 MB development cartridge should have went unused. As it would turn out, however, something was taking up the extra cartridge space at the end. Upon further inspection, exactly half of a 32 MB Ocarina of Time prototype dating back to 1997 was discovered. It is likely that this cartridge originally held the Ocarina of Time demo showcased at Spaceworld 1997, but the first half was overwritten by F-Zero X afterward when the development cartridge was reused. This extra data, now dubbed the "overdump," provided the basis for this project's conception.

Additionally, the "Gigaleak" that occured in mid-2020 provided both a significant amount of insight and assets that were used within this project.

Areas, dialogue, and most textures come from the F-Zero X overdump. The dialogue was translated from Japanese by GlitterBerri and has been formatted so it will fit within text boxes when using the English font. This translation attempts to be as faithful to the original dialogue as possible.



:arrow: Project GitHub page
:arrow: Release Trailer (YouTube)
:arrow: Source
 

Dud

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If the Gigaleak released in Mid-2020, that means development had taken roughly over a year to implement the new assets (textures, buildings, in-game UI, maybe sound?, etc). That's a pretty stellar job on their part! This looks great! I wonder if the team will continue to add-on if more leaks out? That would be really cool. Hope Ninty doesn't decide to take this project down if this gains too much attention.
 

Jonna

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The credits alone clearly indicate a bunch of time into this, but they even put a lot of nice little easter egg things all the way in the menu. If you wait through the selection menu long enough it has an evening cycle where everything tints red.
That actually isn't an Easter egg - I've been following zel on Twitter for some time. They recently found out that the menu used to have time of day cycles!
 
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Jonna

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Interesting. Honestly, though, why recreate a demo? I would be pretty sure that Nintendo has that in an archive somewhere, and if it's on a server, just wait for another dump link on some site like 4chan. Considering what happened last year, it's bound to happen eventually, and then you'll have the actual thing.

Heck, for all we know, with so many ROMs and unreleased content having been dumped in GIGABYTES last year, including N64 ROMs, then it's already available. Did anyone actually take time to sort out all of that content, or did they just do a massive dump all at once? Since there is so much to sort through, who knows?
That thing was sorted through thoroughly - and even if not, so many people want the Spaceworld demos so badly that they would have searched those specifically for them.

As for why this exists when the actual build could show up... why not? We don't actually know if the build even exists somewhere (though the Gigaleak and overdump gives hope) - until such an event happens, it's great to have a compilation of all the assets we do have and things built based on what we DO know!
 
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Ecchi95

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I made a Windows .exe to extract the compressed files from this hack.

Click and drag your SW97 ROM into sw97.exe and it will decompress and extract the compressed files in the ROM.

This tool is unique because it has a MIPS interpreter and it runs the decompression function contained in the ROM.


Source code is included for fun. It was actually a WIP Nintendo 64 emulator I'm still working on but I hacked it to turn it into a SW97 extractor.

It doesn't produce a decompressed ROM. It only extracts individual files.
 

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  • sw97decompressor.zip
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Gamemaster1379

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Wow!
:bow:

Have you tried the medallions yet?
Yeah I tried them all. I'm not sure I understand them all yet. I think the white one bugged out on me, because on Lost Woods it was an arrow, but in Kakariko it did some sort of animation break that did a map wide damage thing that managed to piss off the Cuccos into starting to attack me from the other side of the map.
 

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This was so cool to see! Feels like yesterday watching gaming videos about this demo and how it was lost forever. While this isn’t the same demo as the one from spaceworld, it’s still extremely cool to see such passion put into making this project as realistic as it is.
 

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Really cool, checking this out! Thanks.
To get a cheap one in while they're hot, bet you did more work on this than Ninty did on NSO. :D
 

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