moddedBear

Ocarina of Time Feels Like a New Game

Here's something really neat that I found recently. Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, originally released for the Nintendo 64, has received an unofficial PC port!

The port, called Ship of Harkinian, on GitHub

I've been playing it the past week and it's the most fun I've had with OOT. I've started OOT over multiple times over the years through emulators and various Nintendo releases, but this might be the time I actually finish it.

The best feature is the frame interpolation which lets you play far beyond the game's native frame rate of 20 or so. It's almost perfect and makes the game feel like it's actually running at a higher frame rate despite the extra frames only being interpolated. The controls even feel more responsive and everything just feels tighter, which is nice even if it's placebo.

There's a lot of other things to like such as higher resolutions, widescreen, controller support, and some fixes and quality of life improvements (all optional).

Unfortunately the project developers are somehow under the impression that Discord is a file sharing service, as that's the only way to download builds of the port at the moment. I'm sure it's an honest mistake but still, someone should probably introduce them to a way to distribute builds that doesn't involve creating an account and joining a room on a proprietary chat platform. In the meantime, building the port for yourself is pretty easy if you have Docker set up. Whether you download a build or build it yourself, you'll need to provide your own copy of the OOT ROM.

- moddedBear / 2022-07-17

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