In a few months, Nintendo will release a shiny remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Switch 2. Given its reputation as one of Nintendo's crown jewels, I imagine it will be remarkably faithful to the original, but with new graphics, some tweaks to the controls, and a few other modern touches—like the kinds we've been able to play Ocarina of Time with on PC since 2022.
Ocarina of Time's unofficial PC port Ship of Harkinian, developed by a group dedicated to reverse-engineering the Nintendo 64 game and painstakingly rewriting its code, has a built-in randomizer, accessibility options like text-to-speech, and literally hundreds of enhancements, from autosaving to tunable difficulty to ultrawide to high framerate support. There are options as granular as letting Link unsheathe his sword without attacking and disabling certain graphical effects so that they can be replaced with mods.
Speaking of mods: There are hundreds of those, too, letting you use the character models from the 2011 3DS port, make the UI HD, or play as Wario if you're freaky like that. OOT's unofficial port was a rarity back in 2022, but today it's part of a bustling corner of the hobby game development scene, where hundreds of fans are reverse-engineering old games to make them playable on modern hardware (primarily PC and Android).
There are both PC ports based on fully rewritten games like OOT, but there are also new frameworks for bypassing a lot of that time-consuming work, including N64 Recompiled, ReXGlue for the Xbox 360 and RecompOne for the original PlayStation. Developing a recompilation is still a major undertaking, done for free by skilled developers on their personal time, but it's far more approachable now than it's ever been.
This scene has its challenges—namely an influx of low-effort, AI vibe coded slop that frustrates the developers who've put years of time and sweat into the tools that make these projects possible. And there are, of course, hype-at-all-costs YouTube channels that rush to make videos on each new announcement without investigating whether or not they're AI rush jobs that will never be fully faithful to the original games.
But even with those problems, I'm still going to plant a flag in the ground right here and declare that static recompilation, the go-to technique for porting retro console games to modern systems, is the most exciting thing going on in videogames here in 2026.
I love emulating old games and writing about how they were made for PC Gamer—so much so that I even write an emulation newsletter after hours! Recently I've been playing one of the not-yet-released recompilations mentioned in this article for a future article. More on that in just a few weeks!
Some other emulation-related articles I've written:
🔹How GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin got a turbocharge
🔹The ethics of emulation: how creators, the community, and the law view console emulators
🔹Here's why Wii U emulator Cemu going open source is a big deal for emulation—and for the Steam Deck
As my colleague Morgan Park recently pointed out in his editorial Embrace the great Tech Pause, the timing couldn't be better. Because the games are old and the process of converting the code to a modern language your PC understands is much more efficient than emulating the entire console, recompiled games can run extremely well on really modest hardware.
Morgan called out the "magical experience" of playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess port Dusklight, which runs at 90 fps on the Steam Deck:
"It's an amazing package—both a remaster and a community update bundle—that outclasses Nintendo's own preservation work with modern resolution support, high framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow motion aiming that's better than a Wiimote… Not only are these hand-crafted ports a huge win for preservation, but they inject new life into out-of-print classics while also making them more accessible."
Just this year we've seen notable recompilations for more games than I can keep track of (though filtering out the questionably coded ones narrows the list a bit).
Here are a handful of notable ones—many of which have only ever been playable on one console:
- Jak 3
- Twilight Princess
- Banjo Kazooie and Nuts & Bolts
- Harvest Moon 64
- Pokémon Crystal
- Bomberman 64 and Bomberman Hero
- Snowboard Kids 2
Those are in addition to fan ports released in the last couple years, some of which really go above and beyond in their treatment of the original game. Like sm64coopdx, which adds four-player co-op to Super Mario 64. Or Dinosaur Planet: Recompiled, which is painstakingly restoring the unfinished, never-released N64 version of the Rare game that eventually became Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube.
There are tons more porting projects in the early stages, and hundreds of games being decompiled, though that doesn't mean they'll all end up playable on PC. But there are some other exciting recomp ports I expect in the coming months that are already public:
And there are some
- Donkey Kong 64
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
- Blue Dragon
- Animal Crossing
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
- Fatal Frame
And that's just what's on my radar right now—without mentioning a few for beloved games that are heavily using AI. We'll keep writing about the most exciting recompilations on PC Gamer, but if you want to follow along more closely, check out this thread on Resetera, where members are doing the hard work of weeding out the vibe coded projects from the real deals.
