You Can Now Play Ocarina of Time Like a “modern” PC Game
When Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1996, the gaming world changed irrevocably. The 3D action adventure revolutionized the genre, inspiring a whole new generation of games. While the game is still relevant in 2022 (it just came out on Switch late last year as part of the Nintendo Switch Expansion Pack ), it’s still clearly a game of its time. But what if it wasn’t supposed to feel like this?
Meet the Harbor Masters , developers who have embarked on an adventure of their own with the simple goal of making Ocarina of Time a more modern PC game. Their goal was made possible by fans converting the game into C code in two years. From there, Harbor Masters was able to make a port of Ocarina of Time with HD graphics, widescreen, controller rumble, modding support, and more.
Unlike traditional ports and fan-made remakes (which Nintendo often closes), this version of Ocarina of Time has the distinction of not actually using the game’s code. Instead, software called Ship of Harkinian is designed to read code from a separate ROM file, which is then extracted to run the PC version of the game.
By overcoming this legal hurdle, Ship of Harkinian lets you play the original Ocarina of Time on PC in a whole new way. It also means that the game could be expanded in the future to support features such as 60fps, HD models, texture packs, online play, and support for Linux and Mac. Right now the game is limited to PC and the gameplay runs at the traditional 20fps like on the N64.
In order to play Ocarina of Time with the Harkinian ship, you need to provide your own ROM file. Knowing that Nintendo’s lawyers are watching, Ship of Harkinian emphasizes that said ROM file must be legally obtained. However, to do this, you need to have an original N64 cartridge and access to equipment that can extract the game file from the device. There are resources online to help you learn how to build such an extractor , but if you’ve never done this sort of thing before, it might seem overwhelming.
Of course, the vast majority of people playing retro games on their PCs are not using legal ROMs. It is even possible to do a simple Google search which will bring up a plethora of websites providing download links for just about any retro game ROM you can think of. But this would, of course, be wrong. (While the industry has tried to fight these sites, they remain the primary way to play older games.)
We certainly will not advise you to download Ocarina of Time ROM from the Internet. All we can say is that you need to provide your own ROM in order to run this PC port. Also, you will need a debug version of the ROM ( not the Master Quest version ).
With a debug ROM handy, you’ll need to download Ship of Harkinian from its Discord server . You will find the current build in the #builds channel. Be sure to check out the Read Me document as it contains all the instructions for setting up and running the Ship of Harkinian software. Here’s a direct link to the Read Me , which you can also find via the pinned posts on the #support Discord channel, as well as in the Ship of Harkinian download.
To do this: Unzip the downloaded file, then open OTRGui. Select “Open OoT Rom”, select “Single Thread”, then select Ocarina of Time ROM. Let the system create an archive file for the ROM. When done, open soh.exe to play.
Since it’s not the easiest system in the world to run a game on your PC, you may encounter obstacles. If so, don’t be afraid to check out the #support channel on their Discord. Questions are pouring in at the time of this writing, so there are bound to be others dealing with the same issues. And you know what they say about how dangerous it is to go alone.
[ VGK ]