Golden Sun 25th Anniversary Preservation Project
Alchemy is an unofficial fan project rebuilding Golden Sun: The Broken Seal (TBS) and Golden Sun: The Lost Age (TLA) for the Game Boy Advance from the ground up, without any of the original makers' files. It aims to preserve all six Japanese and European editions of each game as they shipped on the cartridge. The Japanese release is treated as the original and the others as its translations; English Golden Sun is the first edition rebuilt in full.
Previously reported at 70%. Some assembly progress was retracted after a stricter audit. We’re working our way back to 70% with verified recoveries.
Alchemy is rebuilding both games from scratch, the way their makers would have kept them on their own computers: readable program text, retained assembly, and organized pictures, music and text. Each rebuild is compared against the original cartridge down to the last byte. A rebuilt edition either matches the real game exactly or it does not count.
DONE is how much of the game's program has been recovered that way and proven to match. The picture above shows it: solid blocks are recovered and proven, lighter blocks are drafts that are close but not yet exact, and the rest is still unknown. The Data picture shows the same for graphics, sound and text.
The project targets twelve editions, six of each game, using shared source where their behavior matches. English Golden Sun is the first edition rebuilt byte-for-byte in full, with unresolved code still supplied by assembly. The other editions pass compilation checks; those are not complete-ROM verification.
This is a preservation and study project — not a remake, a mod, an emulator or a download of the game. You need your own approved ROMs to build it; nothing here comes from Camelot’s own development files. To build it yourself or help with the reconstruction, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
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.
Thank you to the r/GoldenSun community for sharing Alchemy, cheering it on, and keeping the love for these games alive.