The best way to play The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time on PC – Complete guide

There are a couple of ways you can go about playing the critically acclaimed and for many the greatest game ever, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on PC. You can play the classical N64 version on the PC using any of the N64 emulators, or the 3DS version using Citra. In this guide, we will talk about the best way of playing The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time on PC, using the Ship of Harkinian PC port.

Recently, Ocarina of Time was reverse-engineered by a team of extremely talented fans, and with the help of that, a PC port for the game was created. The PC port uses Ship of Harkinian software to decompile the game and is still being worked on with regular updates and enhancements. This decomposed version of the game creates many enhancement and modding possibilities which is quite evident as the game has some remarkable features already.

Is the Ship of Harkinia, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time PC port legal?

Since no leaked code was used for the reverse engineering process, and every line of code was written by the team makes the port completely legal. The decompiled game opens doors for Ocarina of Time to have official ports on many platforms and makes it a project to watch out for.

The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time PC port- Installation guide.

• The first step would be to join the discord server of the Harbour Masters, the creators of the game. The Discord community is pretty active, updates and announcements are made there regularly.
• The port has two builds the master build and the development build. The master build gets updated every month and is stable and bug-free, on the other hand, the development builds are updated more frequently and include new unstable features and can be buggy. The master build should be used for complete gameplay purposes only, while the development build is meant for testing the new features out.
• Download the latest version of the master build from the discord server and extract it. Upon extracting you will find a readme file which has all the instructions for setting up the port.
• Important – To install the game you will need an Ocarina of Time Rom, the port is compatible with two ROMs specifically -.
  • Ocarina of Time Debug PAL GC (not Master Quest)- recommended
  • Ocarina of Time PAL GameCube-Unstable and buggy
• The Debug rom of Ocarina of Time (Not master Quest) is recommended as it is the most stable and runs the best, I am not allowed to provide the source for the rom but all I can say is that google is your friend.
• Save the rom in the Ship of Harkinion folder, now, launch OTRGui.exe which will bring up a menu asking you to open the Ocarina of Time Rom.
• Once the installation process is complete launch soh.exe and you are good to go.

If your installation process shows errors, make sure that you are using the correct rom of the game.

Updating the Ship of Harikinion Ocarina of Time

In order to update to a newer version all you have to do is simply paste the ‘save’ file inside the new build folder. The save files are located in the save folder in the main directory.

Ocarina of Time features and enhancements.

The Ocarina of Time Ship of Harkinian port comes with plenty of features present in the menu bar which can be accessed using the F1 key. The settings menu includes graphics and control customization. The port also comes with plenty of enhancements including cheats, time-saving fixes and overall changes to the gameplay making the game more smooth and playable with features like free-camera and climb everything.

Important shortcuts:

Key	Action
F1	Toggle menubar
F5	save state
F6	change state
F7	Load state
F10	Fullscreen(OpenGL)
Alt+Enter	Fullscreen(Dx11)
CTRL+R	Reset

Recommended settings and enhancements for the best Ocarina of Time experience.

Under the graphics settings, you can scale up the internal resolution of the game for clearer visuals, and increase the jitter fix to increase the fps. Then match the frame interpolation value under the enhancements menu. Frame interpolation helps increase the framerate without touching the logic of the game and allows you to play the game at much higher frame rates than the original game which was capped at 20 fps. Also, under the enhancements menu enable Disable LOD, Disable Draw distance and Kokiri Draw distance to make the objects at distance look much better.

Another highly recommended feature is the free camera, the free camera makes the game feel more modern by allowing users to use the right analogue stick to move the camera. This can be accessed by navigating to Enhancements<Customize game controls<Camera controls. Another great feature you can enable is the ‘Dpad equip items’, this allows you to assign items to the Dpad keys alongside the C buttons implying that you can equip upto 7 items at once now.

One of the biggest downsides of Ocarina of Time was the extremely slow text speed and no option to skip it at all, this slowed down the gameplay a lot and was extremely annoying. However, the PC port has a specified section for time-saving where you can speed up the annoying slow text, climbing speed and even speed up the hilariously slow movement of King Zora.

Under the Enhancements<Fixes enable all the fixes except the first two and under the restoration section you should enable the red ganon blood.

If you want a more challenging experience you can change the game’s difficulty settings by navigating to Enhancements<Gameplay<Difficulty options.

With a myriad of these amazing features the Ship of Harkinian PC port for The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time remains the best way of playing the game in 2023. After 20+ years gamers very much enjoy playing this timeless masterpiece and the Harbour masters have made sure that the Ocarina of Time experience lives on.

Conclusion

Ship of Harkinian is by far the best method to play the Ocarina of Time on PC. Not only it is a smooth experience, it also makes the game better by removing significant flaws. All these amazing features and enhancements are too good to be overlooked and make a perfect platform for enjoying everyone’s favourite childhood game, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.

Read our guide on how to play the Ocarina of Time 3D and Majoras Mask (3DS version) on Android devices using the Citra emulator.