Ocarina of Time runs natively on PS3 with Ship of Gadeguion, now at version 1.2

Ocarina of Time now has a native PlayStation 3 version. Ship of Gadeguion, made by developer Gadega, takes Ship of Harkinian, the HarbourMasters team's PC port of the 1998 Nintendo 64 classic, and rebuilds it for Sony's 2006 console. It isn't an emulator: the game's C code, which comes from the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team's decompilation, is compiled for the PS3's Cell processor, the RSX graphics chip draws the 3D scenes and one of the Cell's SPU cores mixes the music and sound effects.

The first public build, 1.0.0, appeared on the project's GitHub page on November 8, and the project has moved fast since. A video shared on r/decomps shows it booting from the XMB on an old CRT television and playing through the opening hours in Kokiri Forest.

What changed in a week

Version 1.1.0 was mostly about speed. Vertex lighting and fog moved from the CPU to the RSX, game logic and drawing were split over the Cell's two hardware threads, and hidden surfaces are culled on the GPU. According to the release notes, most areas now hold 60 fps at the TV's native resolution, up to 1080p, where the first build rendered at 720p. It also fixed freezes at the Kokiri Sword chest, the first meeting with the Great Deku Tree and the pause menu inside dungeons. A 1.0.1 patch had already fixed chests handing out the wrong items.

Version 1.2.0

The newest release, out on November 13, is the biggest so far. The PC packaging tool is gone: there's now a single installer for everyone, and on first boot the game copies the player's converted game file from a FAT32 USB stick. Day and night cycles, weather, ambient sounds and first-visit cutscenes now work as they do in Ship of Harkinian, Link's age properly changes with time travel, and the DualShock 3 rumbles, including for the Stone of Agony. Pressing SELECT opens a new side menu with three save state slots, volume controls and a quit option, and an optional debug menu offers warps, a player for 137 cutscenes and an item giver. Crash logs are written to the USB stick so they can be attached to bug reports, and Gohma's boss fight no longer freezes.

What you need

The port needs a PS3 running HEN or custom firmware that can install packages, and your own copy of the game. Only the US 1.0 version has been tested. It contains no Nintendo data: you turn your own copy into the archive file Ship of Harkinian 9.2.x makes on a PC, then bring it over on the USB stick. Ship of Harkinian's PC extras, such as the randomizer, texture packs and mods, aren't available yet, a faint audio stutter is still being investigated, and much of the adventure hasn't been played through on this port yet, so the author is asking for bug reports.

The code is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. To try it, follow the setup guide on the Ship of Gadeguion GitHub page with your own copy of Ocarina of Time.