Before following the steps on this post please make sure you have a working Ghidra environment setup.
So you should be able to run the script ghidraRun (contains .bat on windows) and it should start up Ghidra.
Ghidra doesn’t support Nintendo 64 ROMS out of the box, presumably because not a lot of malware was written for the N64 and thus the NSA would never need one.
Luckily a user known as Warranty Voider has created a loader module which enables us to import N64 ROMS like any other executable 1.
You can find it here: GitHub - zeroKilo/N64LoaderWV: Ghidra Loader Module for N64 ROMs
On the GitHub page you need to either select clone or Download as zip, we would suggest just downloading the zip for now.
You only need to clone if you are planning on contributing, but even then you would probably fork first and then clone.
Find a .z64 file and import it into the project, it should come up as “N64 Loader by Warranty Voider”, but if it comes up as “binary” then it has not been installed correctly.
If the N64 Loader option doesn’t appear for you then you probably don’t have JDK 12 or higher, you can either install JDK12 or build the plugin yourself on jdk11 which is what I did and works just fine :)
After importing the game into Ghidra you will notice that all the functions have default names that start with: FUN_.
These names are not very helpful and we know that the games were compiled with a version of the Official Nintendo 64 SDK, so if we could find those libraries in the binary then we can give them useful names and help start solving the puzzle.
Over on AssemblerGames there is a pack of Signature Files for N64 SDK libraries. You can think of these as a sort of regular expression for compiled function code. It is not always accurate but it is a great start, you can download them from assembler games
Here
After downloading you will notice that these were created for the competing Disassembler called IDA Pro. So in order to open them in Ghidra we need a plugin, the plugin we are looking for is called ApplySig.py.
However currently the plugin ApplySig.py doesn’t work with the N64 Loader due to the addresses as it gives the following error:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid address 0x80000450L
In order to get ApplySig to work you need a patch to ApplySig from user celophi which is available here: Update ApplySig.py by celophi · Pull Request #7 · NWMonster/ApplySig · GitHub
To run it you need to put the script in your home/ghidra_scripts folder and run the “Script Manager” tool, select the checkbox beside ApplySig then click the green run icon.
It will then ask for the *.sig file to open, make sure to select one of the sig files that you downloaded earlier 2.
If you have a version of the N64 SDK then you can use the Parse C Source feature of Ghidra to automatically import structs/classes/defines etc from C Header files. This can save a lot of time from creating them all manually.
If there are any errors with the parsing of the C files then you will need to locate the generated file called: CParserPlugin.out. Normally it is generated in the current users home directory so you can run:
```
cat ~/CParserPlugin.out
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