How an online community took back the Legend of Zelda

It has been in my life for as long as I can remember, so I don't have a first memory of the game. I used to watch my brothers play the game for hours at a time before I could play it myself. It felt like flying when I played through it myself.

I chase that dopamine hit once every year or two, which usually requires dusting off my GameCube and hoping the disk isn't too scratched to read. I haven't been playing the game on the Nintendo console in a while. A few years ago it would have been unimaginable to play it on an unofficial port.

Since the Nintendo 64, Nintendo has re-released the game on every home console it has. The game has grown with me thanks to these official ports. Some ports are better than others. The most recent re-release of the game was abysmal.

It has been difficult to find ways to play the game outside. To run the game on a PC, you have to use an Emulator. Sometimes the game is dramatically affected by the quirks of the Emulator. To build a native, non-emulated port, you need access to the source code of the game.

The problem is that the source code is between God and Nintendo. The only insight into the inner workings of the game is the near-unintelligible binaries compiled from the source code. That's where the idea of decompilation comes in.

A form of reverse engineering is decoyy. A decompilation enthusiast writes new code based on the compiled binaries of the program they are trying to match. They don't need to guess how the original source code looked, they just need to make sure the new code compiles to the same binaries. New code can be treated like source code once they have accomplished that.

For a large program like a video game, this can be very time consuming. The entire game, along with several other entries in the franchise, will be decompiled in 2020. For the first time in more than two decades, a fan-made PC port felt like it was in reach, but that wasn't the case. The group is mostly made up of speedrunners and modders who don't want to port the games they decompile to another platform.

Who can be blamed for their actions? Nintendo is notoriously cautious when it comes to defending their intellectual property, even though software reverse engineering enjoys marginal legal protection. Increased understanding and preservation of the classic games, the need for which is becoming more and more apparent in the video game industry, and which doesn't require a risky port effort to accomplish are some of the goals of the organization.

All of the code is open source. It was almost certain that a port would be attempted, legally risky or not, because of a publicly available code base and deep devotion to the game.

The challenge was taken up by Jack Walker and Kenix. The two started trading ideas for a port based on the growing code base in June of 2020. The first port build was started after a team of volunteers. In March of this year, four months after the initial release of Ocarina of Time, the PC port was renamed the Ship of Harkinian.

Is it possible for anyone to download the full game from the ship of harkinian's discord? The developers of the ship are against piracy. Their downloads page is a sort of shell of the game, with all of the decompiled game mechanics and logic ready to go, but no of the copyrighted assets like character models, level maps, or music that make the game usable.

The user needs to build the port by feeding the ship a specific rom file of the original game from which the assets are pulled. The only legit way to run Ship of Harkinian is to own a version of Ocarina of Time and know how to interface it with a program on your computer. It is not an easy task, but it is worth it because the final product is beautiful.

The opening of Ship of Harkinian gives a familiar scene for fans of the game: a solitary hill lit by a moon and rendered in primitive 3D graphics. A familiar figure rides a familiar horse across the screen as Sentimental chords are struck on a surprisingly faithful sample piano.

The title screen in the official version of the game is the same as this one. The experience from here on out is the same as the original game, with native high-definition output, widescreen compatibility, complete stability, and impressively minuscule input lag.

The settings bar is where you need to start digging into the ship of harkinian. There are a lot of features built out by the volunteer development team.

The game runs at a smooth 60 frames per second. Link wears a tunic that is light blue to match his new look. The climbing and block-pushing speed is increased to make the game easier to play and I can use the extra buttons on my gamepad to equip more items. There are dozens of small changes and updates that make the aging game feel better again, and there are even more to look forward to.

What about the Nintendo bear? The entire project could be forced underground by a single memo from their legal team. Under modern copyright law, rights-holders can wield near limitless power over their work; just the perception of copyrighted work is enough to unleash a lot of legal threats. The fact that Ship has been going for a long time without any word from Kyoto is reason to be hopeful. It is possible that the community's dedication to self-monitoring against copyright violations, aggressively rooting out any attempt at or advocacy of piracy in their ranks, will pay off.

The unofficial option is sometimes the best option if Nintendo puts out low-quality versions of their classics for ridiculously high prices. In a perfect world, there would be paid work for the dedicated developers of Ship. In the real world, its developers are not paid and their labor of love is enjoyed in hushed tones. They love the game so they keep doing it. It is a love that I comprehend.

He is a writer and designer. He likes to tour modern architecture in his free time.