I played the Switch 2 Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on PC without an emulator, and it runs shockingly well

Published Nov 14, 2026, 11:30 AM EST Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Watching the race to get The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on PC as smoothly as possible, whether through more traditional emulation or a static recompilation, has been fascinating. The game launched a little over a week ago, but it's already very playable on high-end gaming PCs through bleeding-edge Switch 2 emulators like Lichii and Fritzi, which are forks of Eglantine, another emulator focused on Nintendo's handheld. While updates are still dropping at an almost hourly rate for both emulators, a tool called Hookshot has emerged that, based on what I've been able to uncover, plays the Ocarina of Time remake the best on PC. Instead of relying on traditional emulation, Hookshot uses static recompilation to translate the game's ARM64 machine code into C, which is then compiled into a native executable that runs on x86-64 Windows or Linux PCs. To accomplish this, Hookshot replicates aspects of Nintendo's Horizon Switch 2 operating system through high-level emulation (HLE), including memory management, file access, and more. Nxnative takes a similar approach on Mac, although it can execute compatible ARM64 game code directly on Apple silicon rather than recompiling it for x86-64. Then very recently, Hookshot was pulled from GitHub, and NotRexed, its creator's account, seems to have been wiped from the platform. At first, I assumed that Nintendo hit the project with a DMCA. After all, the gaming giant removed over 200 Switch emulators on GitHub that are related to Yuzu through a comprehensive DMCA takedown effort earlier this week. Given that Switch 2 emulators trace their codebases to Yuzu, this theory makes a lot of sense. As far as I can tell from the tools' ridiculously active Discord, Hookshot's disappearance is reportedly the result of some sort of dispute between NotRexed and other members of the project's development team. MagicBean's Longshot, a fork of Hookshot, is an effort to continue the original project, with the majority of the team shifting over to it. All that drama aside, Longshot appears to offer the same features and run identically to Hookshot, and if you're interested in trying the tool, it's your only worthwhile static recompilation option right now unless you want to take the more traditional emulation route — at least until Hookshot reappears (if it ever does). Of course, both projects were developed with the help of AI tools, like so many other video game recompilations out there right now. Zelda: Ocarina of Time runs shockingly smoothly on my PC How the game performs will depend on how powerful your PC is So, naturally, I decided to test this very unofficial tool to see if the lofty claims surrounding Hookshot (now Longshot) and countless videos I've seen on social media of Zelda: Ocarina of Time playing smoothly on PC are accurate. I should also mention that I have a pretty powerful gaming PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. Longshot's performance will vary significantly depending on your PC's specs. To play Zelda: Ocarina of Time on PC with Longshot, you need to legally own a copy of the title and dump it into a compatible file format from your jailbroken Switch 2. Nintendo recently patched the exploit that allowed the Switch 2 to be jailbroken with firmware 23.5.0. I don't condone piracy, and personally, I purchased a copy of Ocarina of Time on launch day (it's a spectacular remake of one of the best games of all time – buy it). Once you have an image of the game, download Longshot, add the file, and wait for the game to statically recompile, which, depending on your PC's hardware, should take roughly 30-45 minutes. I've only played a short section of the game, including Kokiri Forest and part of the Great Deku Tree (on the Switch 2, I've made it to the Fire Temple), but the game runs shockingly smoothly on my PC with Longshot, hitting a fairly solid 60fps most of the time (check out the video above). When frames drop, the lowest the game hit was 50fps. Since most of the known shaders seem to be preloaded, there aren't many instances of stuttering either, though it does happen occasionally, particularly when entering a new area (as you can see in the clip above). I've encountered a couple of minor graphical glitches, but nothing that I'd call major. I haven't made it to Hyrule Field yet, but I'd expect performance to drop at least slightly. Thanks to DLSS, Ocarina of Time looks better on PC than on Switch 2 There are several PC quality-of-life graphics settings Still, Ocarina of Time is very playable with Longshot, even if it doesn't run quite as smoothly as it does on the Switch 2. In terms of settings, I have Nvidia DLSS on (Transformer K), with the game running at 2048x1152 pixel resolution. The game also seems to run fine when I increase the frame rate with frame generation, but it still only hits about 71fps. Mostly, I left the in-game graphics settings on default, since that's what I assume the MagicBean team did most of their testing with. Like many other unofficial recompilations, Longshot features several quality-of-life upgrades, including Nvidia DLSS and DLAA, and AMD FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 upscaling. It also adapts to resolutions up to 4K and 5K, including ultrawide 21:9, 32:9, and 4:3 monitors. It supports frame generation, including 2x to 8x with DLSS Frame Generation, along with support for Nvidia Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the best-looking Nintendo-developed games I've ever seen, but these PC-specific visual features take things up several notches and go well beyond the FSR 1 upscaling the Switch 2 game reportedly features, which results in a lot of shimmering and overall lower image quality. There's even built-in mod support, and while nothing has been confirmed yet, a multiplayer mod seems to be in the works for Ocarina of Time through Longshot. As far as playing the Ocarina of Time remake on PC goes, Longshot seems to be the best option out there right now. It's fascinating to see how far the project has come in such a short time, considering the game launched only a week ago (hopefully, more optimization is in the roadmap), and it'll be interesting to see where its development team takes it next. Longshot