TL;DR: The same team that brought Ocarina of Time to PC has been secretly working on yet another high-profile port of a Nintendo 64 classic. Star Fox 64 is about to become much more enjoyable on computer than traditional emulation.
Update (Dec 23): Starship, the PC port of Star Fox 64 is now available on Github.
Harbour Masters 64 recently announced on its Discord server the latest project it has been secretly working on for a few months. Starship is a fan-made PC port of Star Fox 64, the classic shooter on-rails released by Nintendo in 1997 for the Nintendo 64 console.
Harbour Masters 64 is a well-established name in N64 PC ports. The team previously released a PC version of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, providing fans and younger gamers with all the bells and whistles of a proper PC remake, including support for high-res 3D graphics and higher frame rates.
Sonic Dreamcaster, Samplywx, and other developers chimed in on Discord, noting that they have worked on Starship over the last several months. They are now confident enough to showcase their progress to outsiders. A Star Fox speedrunner known as “Rakanai” recently streamed a Starship beta on Twitch and YouTube, confirming that some parts of the game are not fully playable yet and that multiplayer is still missing.
Harbour Masters 64 is known for building ports by decompiling a game’s source code, which is time-consuming in and of itself. A native port born from decompilation can usually provide a significantly better gaming experience, with support for high-resolution 3D graphics and higher frame rates, rendering filters, ultrawide monitors, and more. Modding and lower hardware requirements are also part of the mix.
Rakanai stated that Harbour Masters 64 plans to release the final version of Starship/Star Fox 64 for PC in December. Users must still own a copy of Star Fox 64 to avoid any potential legal backlash.
“Native ports are, like emulation, perfectly legal – you still have to supply your own ROM to run native ports like Starship,” said PC Gamer writer Ted Litchfield.
However, as recent events have shown, Nintendo could still attempt to shut down the Starship project, as the company is very hawkish with its IPs. The Japanese company recently tried to forbid Switch emulation on PCs despite using SNES emulators on its gaming museum Windows machines. That said, Ship of Harkinian, the PC port of Ocarina of Time, is still available for download on GitHub after two years, so Starship should be safe, too.
