Nintendo’s classic action-adventure game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is set to receive a fanmade port for the Sega Dreamcast.
Developer and modding enthusiast Falco Girgis took to Twitter/X to reveal that a fanmade port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is currently in active development for the Sega Dreamcast. He shared a direct hardware capture showing the classic Nintendo 64 title running on Sega’s hardware.
The aforementioned direct capture footage showing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on the Sega Dreamcast can be seen below.
According to Girgis, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Dreamcast port was initially started by an anonymous developer. The individual began the project with the goal of convincing fellow developer jnmartin to get involved. Girgis explained that jnmartin had previously shown little interest in porting the game, despite frequent requests from fans. The anonymous developer believed that once enough groundwork was laid, jnmartin would inevitably join the effort, and this ultimately ended up being true.
Development has progressed rapidly since then. Girgis stated that the entire game is now “mostly playable,” though the port still contains occasional graphical glitches and crashes that need to be resolved. Even so, reaching a playable state represents a major milestone for the fanmade project, especially given the technical challenges of adapting a Nintendo 64 game to the Dreamcast’s hardware architecture.
Girgis himself joined the effort later during development, focusing on performance improvements. Using his SH4-accelerated SH4ZAM library, he has been working to accelerate mathematical operations such as vector and matrix calculations. These optimizations are particularly important for handling complex animations and character skinning for the port. The team is also continuing to refine the control scheme, which Girgis admitted is still somewhat confusing due to the current reliance on debug-style controls during testing.
