Minish Cap Decomp: Five ROMs Including Two Demo Builds

By Indie Kings | October 28, 2026

Updated October 28, 2026: zeldaret/tmc, the decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, reports 100 percent on its progress badge while still publishing a work in progress warning, and it builds five separate Game Boy Advance ROMs: the US, Japanese and European releases plus two demo builds. The repository dates to May 29, 2020, has 32 contributors and 930 stars, and merged its newest change on September 27, 2026.

Image: a black Game Boy Advance, the hardware The Minish Cap shipped on, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five ROMs, two of them demos

Most decompilations verify one or two retail releases. The Minish Cap project verifies five builds, and the two that matter most for preservation are the ones nobody bought. Alongside tmc.gba, tmc_jp.gba and tmc_eu.gba, the README lists tmc_demo_usa.gba and tmc_demo_jp.gba, each with its own SHA1. Demo cartridges are the demos that ran in stores or shipped in promotional contexts, and they are exactly the kind of software that disappears first: produced in small numbers, never sold, and rarely dumped by anyone who keeps a hash database.

Rebuilding them from the same source tree is a stronger claim than rebuilding the retail game. A demo usually contains a subset of content, different build flags and sometimes code that was removed before release, so the project has to account for conditional compilation and for data that only exists in the demo build. The five hashes, b4bd50e4 for the US release and so on down the list, give the project five independent verification targets. If one of them matches, the reconstruction is correct for that binary; if all five match, the source tree has captured the game and its promotional variants, which is a meaningfully more complete record than a single cartridge provides.

A hundred percent and five open issues

The progress badge reports 100 percent, and the README still carries the standard warning that the codebase is a work in progress, that it can change drastically, and that some parts of the ROM may not be shiftable yet. Only five issues are open, which is the lowest count of any Zelda decompilation in this series of articles and a sign that the project has moved past the stage where the issue tracker is a to do list of unknown functions. What remains is the long tail: naming, documentation, and the occasional correctness fix such as the September 27 merge, pull request 708, whose branch name link-fire suggests work on the fire rod or a related item.

Thirty two contributors is a small team for a game with five build targets, and the activity pattern fits: the repository was created on May 29, 2020, the newest merge landed on September 27, 2026, and GitHub records no push after that. This is a project in maintenance, not in crisis. The Minish Cap is also a technically interesting target because it was one of the last major Game Boy Advance titles, shipped in 2004 with a save file that interacted with the GameCube's Four Swords Adventures, and its code reflects a mature understanding of the hardware rather than an early one. A clean matching tree for it is useful to anyone studying late GBA software.

Jenkins, docs and the GBA toolchain

The project's infrastructure is unusual in one respect: its build badge points at jenkins.deco.mp, a Jenkins instance rather than the GitHub Actions setup most repositories use. That reflects the age of the Zelda decompilation community's tooling, which grew up around Jenkins before hosted Actions became the default. It also means the build verification is run on hardware the project controls, which is a reasonable choice for a matching build that depends on a specific compiler version and a specific set of libraries.

The documentation is split between a docs site at zeldaret.github.io/tmc and the repository's INSTALL file, and the README notes that the repository contains none of the assets needed to build the ROM, so a prior copy of the game is required for extraction. That is standard for the Zelda projects and worth repeating because it defines the boundary: the code is public, the data is not, and the build only works for someone who already owns the cartridge. For a game with five regional and demo variants, that boundary is also what keeps the five hash targets meaningful rather than a distribution channel.

Project card

FAQ

What is zeldaret/tmc?
A community decompilation of The Minish Cap that reconstructs the Game Boy Advance game's source and builds ROMs matching the retail and demo releases.

How many ROMs does it build?
Five: the US, Japanese and European retail versions, plus a US demo and a Japanese demo, each with a published SHA1.

Why preserve demo builds?
Demo cartridges were produced in small numbers and rarely dumped, so rebuilding them from source creates a verified record of software that is otherwise easy to lose.

Is it finished?
The progress badge reports 100 percent and only five issues are open, but the README still warns that the codebase is a work in progress and that some ROM parts are not shiftable.

Do I need the game to build it?
Yes. The repository contains no assets, and a prior copy of the game is required for extraction.

Why Jenkins instead of GitHub Actions?
The project's CI predates the current default and still runs on jenkins.deco.mp, which lets it control the toolchain used for matching builds.

Bottom Line

Two demo ROMs are the most valuable thing in this repository, because they preserve software that was never sold and is therefore the least likely to survive in a hash database. Five verified builds from one tree, a 100 percent badge and only five open issues make this the quietest success in the Zelda decompilation family, and the Jenkins setup is a reminder that this community built its infrastructure before the current generation of tools existed. The Minish Cap does not get the attention of Ocarina of Time, and its repository is arguably the more complete artifact.

Sources

• GitHub zeldaret/tmc README, five build targets and SHA1 hashes, asset notice, Jenkins and docs links, accessed October 28, 2026
• zelda64.dev progress badge endpoint for The Minish Cap, accessed October 28, 2026
• GitHub API metadata for zeldaret/tmc, stars, forks, contributors, issues and latest commit, accessed October 28, 2026

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