After The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was fully de-compiled “Courage Reborn” builds on top of it providing ports for various devices and including enhancements such as widescreen support, unlocked framerate and mod support.
I am personally super excited about this, as I never played the original nor the HD remake from Nintendo. And this looks like a great way to experience it.
And as if one port would not be enough there is also Dusk which is its own port. Both are still in progress and still have their sources closed.
I guess I misinterpreted this post and article as saying they were modifying and releasing the game on PC, like Pokémon rom hacks that vet obliterated immediately. But those appear different than this. I suppose we’ll see.
As far as I can tell this exists upon the same legal framework as OpenMW does, which is that it’s a fully custom built engine from the ground up that just so happens to be able to take input from a game file. Nothing about the software actually contains any code that Nintendo ever wrote and in fact isn’t even trying to home bake the game from scratch, it’s JUST an engine. You feed it your ROM file and all Zelda-related content comes from that file.
The Pokemon romhacks that I know of that get taken down are different because they contain the actual code of Pokemon, just modified and redistributed. Smart people distribute romhacks as IPS files that you have to patch manually, the Super Mario World romhacking community has been doing this for literal decades. That functions on the same principle that none of the code being distributed was ever written by Nintendo, the file just interacts with one written by Nintendo.
At least, that’s how I understand the situation.