GoldenEye 64 Has A Speccy Emulator Inside It

Five people will read this.  And four of them will be me.  I don’t care – to me, this is mindblowing and I’ve got a little button called ‘publish’ that means I can spew out any old nonsense and it just appears on the site.  Magic.

So what’s up?  Well, remember Goldeneye – the best first person shooter that’s not Halo (or whatever your game of choice is)?  It had a fully functional ZX Spectrum emulator hidden inside it – and it’s just been discovered.  Rare – I love you even more now.

“By feeding it a proper Spectrum monitor program and calling menu 25 to load a snapshot, any Spectrum 48x program can be run,” says the dude that found it.

“The emulator started life as a side project to see if Spectrum emulation was possible on N64 and was hooked into GE, the current game in development. It was supposed to be removed before release but was only made inaccessible and inoperable. All the registers, dependancies, and script required to run the emulator still reside in retail GoldenEye carts.”

Looks like there’s a few embedded games in there – they’re all Ultimate (Rare’s earlier life) titles too.  Sabre Wulf, Atic Atac, Jetpac, Lunar Jetman, Alien 8, Gun Fright, Underwurlde, Knight Lore, Pssst, Cookie, a 16k ‘monitor program’ and Mire Mare.

I’m kidding.  Knight Lore’s not in there.

Boom!  Or whatever it is you’re supposed to say.

Via TheRWP.

40 Comments

  1. And it’s only just been discovered?! And people thought that Rocksteady hid their stuff well in Arkham Asylum!

    • Looks like it. Kinda explains how they got Jetpac to run on the 360, too.

  2. Goddamit Nofi, stop hijacking people’s accounts! ;)

    I wonder if Rare actually remebers putting this in as it’s been a while since they have worked on Goldeneye and have probably been busy with a lot of titles. I can see them rereleasing it on the virtual store with the emulation unlocked.

    • It’s been a long time since this was done, the people responsible for this may not be working at Rare now.

  3. I love these little nuggets in old games.

  4. I don’t remember the graphics on the N64 being that bad.

  5. This has made me all happy and nostalgic. I loved my Spectrum…

  6. that’s a pretty awesome little find. I love when things like this are found years after release

  7. Next week Alex moves in to a cave and renames himself as “Ug” – he’s THAT retro.

  8. Homebrew on the N64. Who would have guessed it?
    If this was Sony related news people would be all over it. :P

    • was just thinking that lol

  9. How did this fly under the radar for a decade or more, amazing. This is usually the type of thing that comes out a few months after release and then I read about it on wikipedia 3 years after it was actually news.

  10. “By feeding it a proper Spectrum monitor program and calling menu 25 to load a snapshot, any Spectrum 48x program can be run”

    I have no idea what this actually means, but it sounds awesome… Even if just for the last statement.

    I wonder if any part of the code ended up in the Goldeneye remake from last year??

    • No, not a chance.

      • Maybe that’s why the remake was so turd in comparison.

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