Ocarina of Time Remake Runs on PC on Launch Day, at 12-22 FPS for Now

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake launched on Switch 2 on Thursday, November 5, and on the same day it booted on PC in an emulator. Build 75 of the Lichii fork landed on GitHub at 02:37 UTC: the game gets through the intro, and Kokiri Forest renders instead of a white screen. It is not really playable yet. On a Ryzen 9 5900X with an RTX 3080 the developer reports 12 to 22 fps, and outdoor areas drown in fog and glow. Meanwhile the Switch 2 emulators themselves have been downloaded close to half a million times in a week.

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What runs, and on what hardware

The build notes never name the game. They call it "the green-hat kid adventure". Before build 75 it crashed about 20 seconds after launch. Now the emulator translates around 80 shaders it could not handle before, so the world finally shows up, while three rare shaders are still unsupported. The same build also took Star Fox Remake from 30 to 60 fps.

Player videos show better numbers, but they were recorded in the lightest area, at the Great Deku Tree. According to DSOGaming, the reznoire channel gets around 40 fps on a Core i9-14900K with an RTX 4090, and Finn Benchmarks hits 60 fps on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with an RTX 5080 using a third-party fork called Selevet. The open world flickers with artifacts, so a proper playthrough is still a long way off.

Half a million downloads in a week, from Eden-NX2 to Lichii

The first Switch 2 emulator build, Eden-NX2, appeared on October 29. Eglantine showed up on GitHub the same day. Its README says it grew out of Eden, yuzu and Sudachi and was started by a developer called Camille LaVey. Mario Kart World runs at decent to full speed in it, Splatoon Raiders is hit and miss. On October 31 a developer going by zortos293 split off the Lichii fork, which focuses on getting specific games to work and also runs original Switch games.

The GitHub API shows 389,445 downloads across 73 Eglantine builds and another 105,280 across nine Lichii builds as of 14:00 UTC on November 5. The builds from November 4 were downloaded the most, the same day Eglantine put out its first 0.1.0 release candidate. New builds arrive several times a day, and dozens of forks already trail behind them.

Why I would wait a few weeks

The first reason is practical. The remake only runs in certain forks, builds change every few hours, and there are already dozens of copies and forks on GitHub, with no easy way for a regular player to check what is inside an archive. The emulator ships without games, keys or firmware, and you have to dump those from your own console. The Lichii developer also states openly that donations pay for the AI tools used to write the project faster.

The second reason is Nintendo. The yuzu developers shut their project down in 2024 and paid the company $2.4 million, and a court ordered a former r/SwitchPirates moderator to pay $4.5 million. An emulator that boots a game on launch day is exactly the kind of thing Nintendo usually answers with lawyers. I would give it a few weeks: if the project survives, a working build will land in the main branch rather than in a fork.

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