A Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time PC port could be on the way soon thanks to the efforts of a fan decompilation project.
The Zelda community over at Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZRET for short) has been hard at work on this task for about a year, and they have just now reached 65% completion.
The idea behind the project is to completely reverse-engineer the N64 classic game into a C code, which is the same process by which fans of Super Mario 64 managed to port that game to PC last year.
This fan-made version of Ocarina has been completely re-created by the community using modern coding, which means that it doesn't use any of Nintendo's original copyright material and audio – which is why this sort of project is allowed to exist. It also means that this fan project doesn't use the original game's source code.
You can keep up with the progress of the project on the official website, which currently shows that they have reached 65.452% completion at time of writing. Over on the official GitHub, we can see other projects seemingly in the works, with repositories made for Twilight Princess, The Minish Cap and Breath of the Wild.
When fans made Mario 64 available on PC, they also allowed for mods to be installed into the game to change up the experience on modern hardware. One such mod added ray tracing to the N64 game, and another allows it to run at 60fps, so it's not outside of the realm of possibility that we will see some mods like this for Ocarina of Time whenever it becomes available.
It's important to note that the main focus of ZRET is not to bring the game to PC, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually. When asked about the potential of Ocarina of Time coming to PC in some capacity, project member ‘Rozlette’ told Ars Technica that it was "not as easy as just ‘compile it for Windows’.
They went on to say that “there is a lot of code that deals with talking to N64 hardware. The N64 render pipeline is very different than modern OpenGL, for example." Another member added that "it remains quite difficult, especially when considering changes that are considered implicit with a PC target, like being able to change the resolution or framerate."
If you're not planning to wait for a PC port, here are some of the best switch games you can play right now.
