Switch games are the latest targets of AI-built PC ports, and Zelda: Link's Awakening is already playable

[Daniel Sims]

In context: The recent wave of reverse-engineered console games has mostly focused on the Nintendo 64's library, with a few exceptions involving the Xbox 360 and other platforms. However, the trend is slowly creeping toward more recent consoles, including the original Nintendo Switch. Several projects are currently targeting some of Nintendo's biggest releases for the handheld, but only one is publicly available so far.

A free, fan-made PC port of the 2019 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening recently entered a public beta. Built almost entirely with Claude, it is believed to be the first Nintendo Switch PC port of its kind to reach GitHub.

Interested parties can run the port natively on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with an experimental Arm Linux build also available. Like most other unofficial recompilations, it requires users to independently source the actual game files.

New features include support for multiple aspect ratios, unlocked internal and display resolutions, button prompts for alternate controllers, keyboard support, optional 360-degree movement, and a randomizer. The randomizer supports per-seed save files, item and quest shuffling, and much more.

Developer peiikai is upfront about using Claude to decompile and reverse-engineer the game, write almost all of the code, and generate the GitHub repository's documentation. Claude and other AI tools have been behind most of the fan-made PC ports that have flooded GitHub over the past several weeks.

Native PC ports can be less demanding than emulation and enable new features, such as higher resolutions, enhanced performance, and modding. However, before the emergence of AI coding agents, efforts to reverse engineer classic games often hit insurmountable walls. AI has helped many projects overcome these obstacles, but the technology can introduce problems of its own.

Read our feature: Decompilation on Steroids - Why AI Is Suddenly Cracking Open Old Software

While AI makes translating code far easier and cheaper, the technology is controversial because it cannot ensure a smooth reproduction on its own. Peiikai stresses that the Link's Awakening decompilation remains in beta and has several serious known issues.

Still, the port is potentially significant because it reproduces a game released only seven years ago for a platform Nintendo only recently began to sunset. Most recompilation projects currently focus on games released two to three decades ago for older platforms.

Furthermore, Link's Awakening won't be the last Switch game to be recompiled. Footage also recently appeared of early work on ports of Super Mario Odyssey (2017) and Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023). While the files for these projects are not available yet and performance remains unstable, YouTube videos show them nearly reaching 60fps on a laptop with an RTX 3050.

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Switch games are the latest targets of AI-built PC ports, and Zelda: Link's Awakening is already playable

 

[gdavid65]

It is insane how fast this scene is moving!

Uncharted 1-3 on PS4 now have native builds for PC + Linux, as well as Bloodborne, God of War 3, Gran Turismo Sport, Silent Hill, Shadow of the Colossus, and many more.

Literally every other day there is a new ported release to PC.

PS5 games are also in progress, including some very recent releases such as Saros, and while they are running slowly now, in 6-12 months will be fully playable on PC at high FPS.

Bold words - but if Rockstar don't release GTAVI for PC in the next 12 months, it will be playable via a PC rebuild before then.

 

[m4a4]

Maybe this will finally force these dinosaurs to drop the archaic mindset of exclusives.

Better to be the one porting it for a price vs letting AI to port it to us people who don't want underpowered mobile hardware with a much worse experience...

 

[yRaz]

Maybe this will finally force these dinosaurs to drop the archaic mindset of exclusives.

Better to be the one porting it for a price vs letting AI to port it to us people who don't want underpowered mobile hardware with a much worse experience...

One reason I don't think this trend will stop is that there are countries around the the world where US copyright law is basically unenforeable and they're too poor to afford the barrier to entry that these companies are asking. AI ports are going to be EXTREMELY popular in Asia, Africa and centeral/south America.

There was a time when owning a console and having access to your games provided actual value, but games are now so expensive that the largest group of people spending money on games is actually the 30-40 bracket when games were supposed to be for basically teenagers. Well I know most parents don't have any money which means the kids don't have money to spend on games and that's a big problem for the industry. Most of the games I play are from 10+ years ago. I spend most of my gaming time playing either ESO or EvE but I recently played Baldurs gate 1&2.

The funny thing is that this massive investment into AI as these companies try to make employees irrelevant is actually going back the other way and making THEM irrelevant. My favorite part about AI is I can, for abnout $20,000 build a compute cluster that can run some of the largest models. It might not get stuff done as quickly, but some of this stuff isn't time sensitive. There are open source models that gives results just as good as Claude and if you're someone who $3,000-4,000 tokens a month, buying or building your own AI cluster. My favorite thing about some of these large parameter open source models is that they're showing that you don't actually need millions in hardware to get AI to run. These AI companies aren't actually selling AI, they're selling access to hardware that can run AI.

AI, for all purposes, is free. I also think that nVidia is reading the room with the RTX spark laptops. There is Billions in unused nvidia GPUS sitting in warehouses around the world because because noone can plug them in. We keep hearing about demand for AI but what I'm asking is where is all this demand? Surely the AI companies wouldn't be getting into price wars if demand was way in excess of supply.

The future of AI is local, the biggest cost of the RTX spark nonsense is in the price of memory. There are signs that memory prices are dropping, mainly because the high prices finally made it a financially viable investment for China to develop their own technology rather than rely on the west. But when prices finally do normalize, the spark laptops are going to be a $2000 piece of hardware, not $6-7000.

With local AI becoming increasingly common and the demand for games in countries where the US doesn't rule, I don't really see how these tech companies who had started to squeeze and mistreat consumers in favor of growth instead of sustainability are essentially going to lose everything to AI. So I'm not sure if AI is good now because it was coming for everyones jobs, but it also also destroying these anti-consumer business models that have been getting worse every year. I am loving the irony of this situation and I think we have finally reached the straw that broke the camel's back. These kind of things have always existed, but it took fairly advanced users years to get a functional product that still had some jank to it and you needed some technically skills to get it working. Now, AI is reverse engineering this stuff and repackaging it so quickly that I really don't know these companies can keep up with it.

It was also completely avoidable, which makes the situation any dumber. One reason people don't have any sympathy for the companies on this is that games are getting so expensive and everything is unnecessarily being hidden behind subsriptions with the services being so bad that it's difficult to care. We solve piracy ~15 years ago with netflix. It got rid of the ads, the bloat and it brought prices down while providing a service that made piracy more inconvient. They have gotten rid of all of that. The ads are back, the high prices are back and they still want MORE from us. This endless drive for growth instead of just being happy with a sustainable and profitable business ends up eating itself and that's what I think we're seeing right now

 

[m4a4]

One reason I don't think this trend will stop is that there are countries around the the world where US copyright law is basically unenforeable and they're too poor to afford the barrier to entry that these companies are asking. AI ports are going to be EXTREMELY popular in Asia, Africa and centeral/south America.

There was a time when owning a console and having access to your games provided actual value, but games are now so expensive that the largest group of people spending money on games is actually the 30-40 bracket when games were supposed to be for basically teenagers. Well I know most parents don't have any money which means the kids don't have money to spend on games and that's a big problem for the industry. Most of the games I play are from 10+ years ago. I spend most of my gaming time playing either ESO or EvE but I recently played Baldurs gate 1&2.

The funny thing is that this massive investment into AI as these companies try to make employees irrelevant is actually going back the other way and making THEM irrelevant. My favorite part about AI is I can, for abnout $20,000 build a compute cluster that can run some of the largest models. It might not get stuff done as quickly, but some of this stuff isn't time sensitive. There are open source models that gives results just as good as Claude and if you're someone who $3,000-4,000 tokens a month, buying or building your own AI cluster. My favorite thing about some of these large parameter open source models is that they're showing that you don't actually need millions in hardware to get AI to run. These AI companies aren't actually selling AI, they're selling access to hardware that can run AI.

AI, for all purposes, is free. I also think that nVidia is reading the room with the RTX spark laptops. There is Billions in unused nvidia GPUS sitting in warehouses around the world because because noone can plug them in. We keep hearing about demand for AI but what I'm asking is where is all this demand? Surely the AI companies wouldn't be getting into price wars if demand was way in excess of supply.

The future of AI is local, the biggest cost of the RTX spark nonsense is in the price of memory. There are signs that memory prices are dropping, mainly because the high prices finally made it a financially viable investment for China to develop their own technology rather than rely on the west. But when prices finally do normalize, the spark laptops are going to be a $2000 piece of hardware, not $6-7000.

With local AI becoming increasingly common and the demand for games in countries where the US doesn't rule, I don't really see how these tech companies who had started to squeeze and mistreat consumers in favor of growth instead of sustainability are essentially going to lose everything to AI. So I'm not sure if AI is good now because it was coming for everyones jobs, but it also also destroying these anti-consumer business models that have been getting worse every year. I am loving the irony of this situation and I think we have finally reached the straw that broke the camel's back. These kind of things have always existed, but it took fairly advanced users years to get a functional product that still had some jank to it and you needed some technically skills to get it working. Now, AI is reverse engineering this stuff and repackaging it so quickly that I really don't know these companies can keep up with it.

It was also completely avoidable, which makes the situation any dumber. One reason people don't have any sympathy for the companies on this is that games are getting so expensive and everything is unnecessarily being hidden behind subsriptions with the services being so bad that it's difficult to care. We solve piracy ~15 years ago with netflix. It got rid of the ads, the bloat and it brought prices down while providing a service that made piracy more inconvient. They have gotten rid of all of that. The ads are back, the high prices are back and they still want MORE from us. This endless drive for growth instead of just being happy with a sustainable and profitable business ends up eating itself and that's what I think we're seeing right now

Oh, I'm not implying that these companies can eliminate it by providing what the customer wants (finally), but that they can cash in on the people honest enough (and able) to buy it.

Otherwise, I am more than happy enough to play a Nintendo game ported to PC, official or not.

 

[NumberNine]

Still, the port is potentially significant because it reproduces a game released only seven years ago for a platform Nintendo only recently began to sunset.

I don't think Nintendo is sunsetting the Switch platform, just based on the fact that it is their only hardware platform and was recently upgraded.