Golden Sun 25th Anniversary Preservation Project
Alchemy is an unofficial clean-room reconstruction of Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age for the Game Boy Advance. It preserves all six Japanese and European-language editions of each game from the original cartridges, with Japanese as the canonical source base and the English Golden Sun release as the first complete derived build target.
Alchemy rebuilds the games from readable source code, retained assembly, and
named assets while checking the result byte for byte against an approved
cartridge image. The historical editions remain independent from the future
games/alchemy/ reintegration, so new work cannot weaken their preservation
evidence.
The repository contains one shared source tree per game rather than a copy for
every language. make targets checks all twelve edition routes; make verify
is the authoritative full-ROM gate for the current gs1-en target. Progress
is measured by reconstructed bytes. Proven C is C that compiles through the
approved route to byte-identical output. Proven ASM is code whose required form
cannot be emitted as ordinary C by the approved compiler model, with the reason
recorded and the assembly reproduced byte-exactly. Neither label claims access
to Camelot's original source. Draft classifications never count as DONE.
This is a preservation and decompilation project—not a remake, ROM hack, emulator, or game distribution. No ROM is included. To build locally or help with the reconstruction, see CONTRIBUTING.md, including its complete tooling index.
Golden Sun, its characters, music, art, and original code were created by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo. Alchemy is an independent fan preservation project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either company.
Thank you to everyone documenting the Game Boy Advance, improving preservation tooling, testing reconstructed editions, and contributing careful clean-room work to Alchemy.