Switch 2’s Zelda Ocarina of Time Already Runs on PC and Mac
Days after Nintendo released Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 on November 5, community tools are running it on Windows PCs and Macs. A tool called Hookshot reportedly reaches about 50fps on a midrange GPU. Performance claims remain unverified, and the tools require a jailbroken console.
Switch 2's Zelda: Ocarina of Time, released November 5, is already running on Windows PCs and Macs through community-built tools. Developers started getting the remake working within days of launch, and performance is improving fast.
The results are uneven. On high-end PCs the game looks somewhat playable, though graphical glitches and other problems remain.
Emulators multiply on PC
Several forks of a Switch 2 emulator called Lichii, itself a fork of Eglantine, have appeared with differing claims about speed. Many of them are "vibe-coded" projects, built with the help of AI tools, all racing to be first to run the remake of the N64 classic smoothly.
One YouTube video, posted by ItsOOGWAY, shows Nvidia's DLSS 5 running on a PC emulating the game. It uses a Lichii fork called Fritzi, a community-developed DLSS 5 manager and Live Flow Multi Frame Generation. The effect is subtle, but the extra detail DLSS 5 adds is visible.
Hookshot takes a different route
A tool called Hookshot skips traditional emulation. It statically recompiles the game's Arm code, meaning it converts it ahead of time into a native Windows program.
Users must build the game from their own files. Hookshot adds 2x, 3x and 4x frame generation, upscaling and ultrawide support.
Reports indicate it runs the game more smoothly than any current emulator. According to Hookshot's developer, NotRexed, performance falls in the 50fps range without frame generation on a Ryzen 7600X processor and a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB graphics card.
Macs and an iPhone
Macs are doing better. Nxnative, a tool that lets Switch games run on Mac, has been updated with Switch 2 support. One clip shows the game at 60fps in the Great Deku Tree.
Nxnative works somewhat like Wine, the open-source layer that runs Windows apps on Linux. Because both the Switch and Apple devices use Arm-based processors, it can run much of the game's original ARM64 code directly on Apple chips. It recreates the console's system services and translates its graphics API to Apple's Metal. That is part of why Switch 2 titles tend to run more smoothly on Mac than on PC.
Joe Jiang, posting as @happyjoejiang on Twitter, has also shown an iPhone port of the game.
What it takes to play
Running the game this way requires a legally owned copy. Players must dump it into a compatible file format from a jailbroken Switch 2.
The performance claims come from the developers and users who posted them. They have not been independently verified.
