A fan-made Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time PC port is now available. Created by a mod group named the Harbour Masters, the Zelda: Ocarina of Time PC version–called Ship of Harkinian–comes with the following features: HD graphics, widescreen support, keyboard and controller, modding, and gyroscope support.
The Harbour Masters released the PC port on their Discord, and players can check out the Harbour of Masters’ Github page for information as well.
— shipofharkinian (@shipofharkinian) March 23, 2022
Nintendo is notoriously copyright-lawsuit-happy, and the Harbour Masters have tried to make the port as technically “legal” as possible. According to an interview with VGC, Ship of Harkinian works by extracting the game’s native assets from the N64 ROM (which you will need to own to run the PC port) and then running a native PC version. The creators believe this may make it legal because the code is created from scratch, and the copyrighted parts, the assets, are taken from the ROM players are supposed to have “legally obtained.”
However, there’s a precedent for Nintendo going after games made in a similar fashion to Ship of Harkinian. Nintendo, while not directly suing the creator, tried to remove all online results for the Mario 64 PC port in 2020. That PC port also required users to have a ROM for the assets, according to Reddit users who obtained the file (it’s no longer readily available). Similar to Ship of Harkinian, Mario 64’s PC port’s code was built on reverse engineering the N64 classic into readable C code. It remains to be seen how Nintendo will respond to the Ocarina of Time PC port, but the odds aren’t great.
The Harbour Masters are also planning to add even more features to the port and here’s a list of many things players can look forward to in the future: text-to-speech, visual feedback, 60 fps, twin-stick camera controls, scripting system, HD models, HD audio, texture packs, Linux and Mac support.
Source: Gamespot
