The PC version will support widescreen, mods, and 60 FPS and will be ready in February.
A group of community developers called Harbour Masters is working on the PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which they say is 90% complete and could be released in February.
The game will support different resolutions and modding. This is not the first time a Nintendo 64 game is ported to PC: in 2019, the same was done to Super Mario 64.
For their work, Harbour Masters use reverse engineering – a method of repeating the code without studying it.
Harbour Masters developer Kenix told VGC that the group started working on the PC port as soon as Ocarina of Time's code was fully reverse-engineered.
"We actually started putting down code in the middle of December last year,” they said. “Currently all of the game logic runs pretty much flawlessly. We have a few assets that aren’t packed correctly in the archive, most specifically skyboxes, and there are still a few graphical errors we are working through. Audio is also not yet decompiled.
"I’d give it approximately 90%. We’ve been hoping to be complete by the middle of February and use a month or so until April 1st to refine the game before release. We’re hoping to have a public repository available in late February."
Ocarina of Time uses the same renderer that was written for the Mario 64 port – Fast3D. "Widescreen is supported out of the box by the rendering backend we are using, Fast3D," they explained.
"We have a roadmap for other things like 60fps. We already did the research to figure out what needs to be changed to make this work."
The team also plans to add such features as a scripting system similar to modern games' to make mod support easier. The developers say that most of their work has gone into the process of importing/exporting different game asset types.
"Our archives also support ‘patches.’ These patches can replace an asset from the original archive. If you want to for example do a texture pack, all you have to do is create an archive that has the same texture path as the original and the system will figure out the newest one to use for you.
"This is the first step in our plan to support modding. Our archive format is the .MPQ file which is used in Blizzard games, but we are giving it the .OTR extension."
The group says it’s coding a library along with the port called libultraship (LUS), which handles the required aspects of the Nintendo 64 to PC conversion.
Interestingly enough, Harbour Masters are not the only ones working on the Zelda PC port. Engineer Vertigo, who used to be active in the SM64 PC modding scene, is working on their own PC version of Ocarina "with minimal glitches and no sound." The project is expected to be finished by mid-February. Here are the pictures of what they've done so far:
Vertigo is porting the game using an open-source renderer GlideN64, used by popular N64 emulators.
"I was about 13 when Super Mario 64 came out, so that and Ocarina of Time are staples of my childhood,” they told VGC. “I got involved in the SM64 port to share that experience with my son because Nintendo’s offerings had always been terrible. He really enjoyed SM64, and I look forward to playing OOT with him :)"
One might expect the two groups to work together, however, Vertigo said their design philosophies and middleware were so different, that they wouldn’t be able to work together efficiently.
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