Zelda Port
Image: VGC / Harbour Masters

A fan-made PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is in the works, and it's apparently almost done — and could be out as soon as next month.

In an exclusive interview with VGC, the developers — a group calling themselves "Harbour Masters" — spoke about their efforts to re-release the game on PC in February:

"We actually started putting down code in the middle of December last year. 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.”

The N64 game was decompiled in November 2021 by the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team, which allowed Harbour Masters to almost immediately set to work on their port, using new code that reproduces the entire game while also allowing them to stay on the right side of the law.

As VGC's Andy Robinson puts it, "This kind of reverse engineering is made legal because the fans involved did not use any leaked content, nor use any of Nintendo’s original copyrighted assets."

Harbour Masters' version uses technology that was created to bring Super Mario 64 to PC, which allows it to support widescreen "out of the box". And boy, does widescreen Ocarina of Time look good:

The team is also working to ensure that mods are supported, so you can expect us to start covering all the weiiird things people add to the game in a couple of months.

Harbour Masters are dedicated to their craft, too — they've begun to code a library alongside the Ocarina of Time port, called "librultraship", which will make the N64-to-PC pipeline much easier for future developers, including themselves: “We expect this and our processes to result in a port of Majora’s Mask shortly after it reaches 100%,” they told VGC.