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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past gets a reverse-engineered clone

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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the 1991 classic from Nintendo has been reverse-engineered to bring it natively to more platforms. Nintendo are no doubt warming up their lawyers. Available on GitHub under the MIT license, it notes the game is fully playable from start to finish and it does need the original ROM for the resources, so it doesn't include the copyrighted assets.

Some extra features were added too including:

  • Support for pixel shaders.
  • Support for enhanced aspect ratios of 16:9 or 16:10.
  • Higher quality world map.
  • Support for MSU audio tracks.
  • Secondary item slot on button X (Hold X in inventory to select).
  • Switching current item with L/R keys.

Looks like it's supported to run it across Linux, macOS and Windows too!

You can see their own side-by-side comparison in the below video:

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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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24 comments
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Whitewolfe80 Feb 2, 2023
So another project you'll need to grab it before it's nuked from orbit by Nintendo legal team
Pengling Feb 2, 2023
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: legluondunetPlaystation is opening its doors to PC gamers, they are now selling some of their games on Steam and you can play other PS games on the cloud with PS+
With Xbox Game Pass, PC gamers can play XBOX games on the cloud.
The physical console is evolving towards dematerialized and you can play the same games on Windows, Linux, Android through the cloud... Whatever the OS or your hardware.
What awaits Nintendo to follow? There are a lot of Nintendo game fan projects, why? Because people want to play their games, old or new, and they can't! The competition is fierce, I think Nintendo should open up its market, not stay cloistered on a machine or they will disappear, like Sega before.
Nintendo has put themselves into an odd position with this, too - their strength has always been in their franchises, but some spin-offs are handled by outside contractors and have been turned into advertisements for Sony and Microsoft properties. This dents the value of Nintendo's franchises quite a bit. One game has spent years pushing titles that aren't even on the Switch, and you can play most or all of what's being promoted better on a Steam Deck, now. It won't do them any favours going forward, I'd imagine.
Klaas Feb 2, 2023
Concerning AppImage/Flatpak:

The binary only depends on SDL2 and glibc, so that would be overkill.

The ROM to asset archive step requires Python with Pillow and PyYAML.
faceless Feb 3, 2023
Also works great on a Raspberry pi 400. Just needed to tweak the ini file to swap gamepad buttons B->A and X->Y to use a xbox 360 wired controller, enable 16:9 res and MSU audio tracks. For the enhanced audio tracks I got the JUD6MENT's Zelda Deluxe Orchestral PCM Set, which is awesome!

Also, regarding AppImage/Flatpak, game assets can't be distributed so I doubt they will be made available.


Last edited by faceless on 3 February 2023 at 3:26 pm UTC
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