Wind Waker decomp is open for builds: here's what you need

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for GameCube now has a work-in-progress decompilation on GitHub, in the zeldaret/tww repo. This isn’t an emulator or a mod you load onto a console. It’s a set of source files and tools that rebuild the game’s code, and you can clone it and try a build today. The repo ships no game assets or assembly, so you need your own copy of the game.

The project supports every GameCube release it lists: GZLE01 Rev 0 (USA), Rev 48 (KOR), GZLP01 Rev 0 (PAL), GZLJ01 Rev 0 (JPN), and the D44J01 kiosk demo (JPN). Disc images can be ISO (GCM), RVZ, WIA, WBFS, CISO, NFS, GCZ, or TGC.

Here’s the path from the README:

1. Install the dependencies. On Windows, native tooling is highly recommended. WSL and msys2 aren’t required. Install Python and add it to %PATH%, then install ninja with pip install ninja. On macOS, run brew install ninja. On Linux, install ninja. wibo downloads automatically on macOS and Linux.
2. Clone the repo with git clone https://github.com/zeldaret/tww.git.
3. Copy your disc image to orig/GZLE01. You can delete the image after the first build to save space.
4. Run python configure.py. For another region, add --version GZLJ01 or --version GZLP01.
5. Run ninja to build.

For diffing, download objdiff from encounter/objdiff, then set the project directory. Under WSL, objdiff can’t see filesystem changes, so it won’t rebuild on its own. Ghidra is optional. The team has a shared server at ghidra.decomp.dev, but you need a linked Discord account and approved Read access first. The README also warns that Ghidra’s output isn’t accurate enough to paste straight into the project.

The interesting part is the contribution rule. The project won’t accept pull requests that are mostly AI-generated or copied from Ghidra. Anything with obvious machine-generated signs gets closed. Right now, that’s a hard line in a scene where vibe-coded work is everywhere. The README also doesn’t say how far along the decomp is or what it can do beyond the build.

So: you can build it today if you own the disc and don’t mind a command line. If you want to help, read the coding guidelines and write the code yourself.