In Golden Sun, lighting the four Elemental Lighthouses releases Alchemy upon the world. I’m doing the same thing to the games themselves. The Broken Seal ☀️ and The Lost Age ⚓️ are being rewritten, piece by piece, into a form people can read, change and build on.
☀️ 90.28% · ⚓️ 5.01%
The number is how much of each game has been rewritten, counted across all six languages it shipped in. A piece only counts once the rebuilt game is identical to the original, so the number can’t be talked into going up.
The chart shows The Broken Seal in gold and The Lost Age in blue, with hourly measurements where available and the older daily records elsewhere. Dips mark stricter counts, not lost work.
When Camelot made Golden Sun, they wrote it as instructions a person can read and then turned those into the unreadable code that sits on the cartridge. The readable version was never released.
Alchemy works backwards. Piece by piece, it rewrites the game in readable form, and every piece is checked against the original until the two are identical. The result isn’t a guess at how Golden Sun works: it is Golden Sun, in a form people can finally read. I also try to make it look the way Camelot’s own work might have looked in 2001, down to names taken from the Japanese release: Sukureta for Kraden, Gerald for Garet.
I do this with AI, and a lot of it. The AI does the heavy lifting, and the original game is the judge.
Once a game can be read, it can be changed. That opens the door to things fans have wanted for years: Golden Sun running natively on PC, phones and modern consoles, widescreen and smoother frame rates, quality-of-life fixes, new translations, and new storylines, quests and Djinn. Alchemy doesn’t do these things itself. It lays the foundation, and then all of us get to build on it.
Alchemy is not a remake, a mod, an emulator or a download of the games. It doesn’t include the games themselves; you’ll need your own copies. For now, the best way to help is to share the project and cheer it on. It will open to outside contributions once both games are complete, and developers can find the technical details in AGENTS.md.
Golden Sun, its characters, music, art and original code were created by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo. Alchemy is an unofficial fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either company.
Thank you to:
- The r/GoldenSun community, for sharing Alchemy, cheering it on, and keeping the love for these games alive.
- Tarpman and Karathan, for identifying the compiler and flags Camelot used.
- Coaltergeist, for camelot-gcc, the compiler Alchemy first built with.
- pret, whose decompilations set the standard Alchemy measures itself against, and whose agbcc Alchemy builds the games’ library code with.