In November 2021, a team of fans at Zelda spent 64 reverse engineering 2 years on the projectrevealed that they had painstakingly recreated the entirety The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Now, just a few months later, we’re getting a good look at one of the main goals of this project: a proper PC port of the game.
How does that differ from someone playing the game on a PC through emulation now? This game is Nintendo’s original code for a 90’s console, with the emulator essentially translating it to run on a modern PC. This code was reverse engineered and rebuilt from the ground up to run on a pc for a pc.
For fans, this means they can play a version of the game that’s native to the platform. For example, this port – made by zel and vertigo – supports widescreen and upscaling, and opens the door to some extensive mods that can be made for that too. Please also note the end of the video, where they show that the water temple reflections work perfectly.
However, there are some catches. First, it’s unclear how legal all that is Speaking of Nintendo, that’s a pretty big catch. Here’s what I wrote about this puzzle last time we came across it: according to fans reverse engineering Super Mario 64:
These fans have… recreated all of the game’s code – albeit “using modern programming languages” – from the ground up, to the point where it functions functionally identical to the original. This means that there is an expectation technically
You haven’t done anything illegal. How legally secure that is remains to be seen, but for reference reverse engineering Super Mario 64 The code is still available at its source, although Nintendo is pursuing some projects based on this code.
The second is that you might understandably watch the video above and think that it still runs pretty slugg ishly for a game reverse engineered specifically for PC. It turns out there is a very good technical explanation for this summed up by mvit
The n64 version actually runs at three frame rates, 60 fps for the pause screen, 30 fps for the title screen and 20 fps for the overworld. Thanks to decompression, we figured out what controls game speed, so theoretically 60fps is possible.
The real problem stems from the fact that NPC routines and some of Link’s movesets (Sword Slash, Hookshot, Backflips, Frontflips) all calculate their distance based on framerate. So at 60 fps, Link just triples his jump distance, hookshot distance, and so on.
60 fps is then realistically possible once these features are properly documented and a nice workaround is found to counteract these results.
So corrections will come – this is a work-in-progress – but they haven’t been made yet still. If you want to know more about the effort, there is some links in the description of the youtube video.
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