Nintendo’s The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake is already running on PC via emulation before its release.
Nintendo Switch 2 emulation continues to make rapid progress, with The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake now running on PC before it has even been released! This feat has been achieved by Lichii (via Unreal Gaming PC on YouTube), an experimental, open-source Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 emulator written in C++. It builds on Eglantine, Eden, yuzu and Sudachi, preserving their contributions while developing this fork’s game compatibility and renderer fixes.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Gameplay On Lichii Emulator
Gameplay footage of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on PC via the Lichii emulator can be seen below.
The game is running on a powerful PC equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, and 64GB of RAM. The current build runs the opening cutscene at 60 fps, but performance takes a major dip into the 20s during gameplay. There’s also an excessive amount of bloom visible on-screen. While it’s not quite playable just yet, it’s still surprising progress given that The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake hasn’t even official released yet.
Last month, multiple sources reported that Nintendo Switch 2 emulation had become a reality just a few days after a major webkit exploit was discovered in the console’s system software, allowing its firmware to be dumped. Exclusive titles like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, Splatoon Raiders, Pokemon Pokopia, and Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave were shown running on PC and Mac.
As we recently discussed, the Nintendo Switch 2 firmware dump opened new possibilities for reverse engineering and emulation on PC. A better understanding of the system’s software and hardware interfaces is helping developers in reproducing the console’s behavior on PC. The firmware dump was made possible by an extraction tool developed by modder Kurumuz. Additionally, another researcher succeeded in extracting decrypted game files for Mario Kart World and other titles.
