Zelda: Ocarina of Time reportedly already runs on PC through an emulator, just hours after its Switch 2 release

Credit: Nintendo Published Nov 5, 2026, 4:46 PM 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. Sign in to your XDA account The anticipated Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is already sort of playable on PC through emulators — yes, you read that correctly. Switch emulation is still very much in its infancy, with games like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bonanza (Splatoon Raiders barely boots) running at varied frame rates on PC through emulators like Eglatine, a fork of a Switch 2-focused version of the Switch emulator Eden, and Lichii, which is actually a fork of Eglatine. Of course, all of this follows the Switch 2 being jailbroken last month. Confused yet? Don't worry — me too; a lot has happened in space in a short time. Progress on these projects is moving surprisingly quickly thanks to AI tools like Claude. A quick scroll on certain corners of social media reveals countless other forks of both emulators, with their creators competing to get Zelda: Ocarina of Time running more smoothly on PC through emulation. When it comes to the Ocarina of Time Switch 2 remake, Lichii seems to be making the most progress, with the game running between 15fps and 30fps (the game runs at 60fps on the Switch 2), depending on how powerful your hardware is. There's even an example of someone getting the game to run at pretty much 60fps with Lichii inside the Great Deku Tree on an RTX 5080 and a 980X3D. The relatively solid frame rate is likely because this is a relatively small area in the game, and my bet is it slows to a crawl in Hyrule Field. Still, it's impressive to see in action. I wouldn't be surprised to see Zelda: Ocarina of Time in a more playable state on PC relatively quickly Switch 2 PC emulation is moving at a fast pace Ocarina of Time emulation on PC still seems full of visual glitches and, in general, is a bit of a mess. In some clips I've seen, players can't even get out of the game's starting area. Still, it's surprising to see the game running on PC this quickly, and Nintendo likely isn't very happy about the situation. While earlier Lichii builds could barely run Ocarina of Time, build 75 includes several performance improvements, including 80 previously unsupported shaders, allowing more environments to render correctly. Zortos293, the developer behind the project, says there are still many issues to iron out, including too much fog, overexposed lighting, and overall poor performance. To play Zelda: Ocarina of Time on PC with an emulator, you need to legally own a copy of the title that you've dumped from your jailbroken Switch 2. I also haven't tried running the game through Lichii myself, so I can't verify the emulator footage we've seen online. However, it looks very legitimate to me. In other AI port-related news, Anthropic seems to have introduced an instruction telling Claude not to recreate specific existing games, even if they're renamed, which could limit the explosive growth the retro and modern PC port space has seen over the past few weeks.