If you’ve been keeping up with the retro console gaming scene, you know that it’s a great time to play some golden oldies on your PC—and I’m not talking about emulation. Recompiled unofficial ports of games like Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, and the Jak & Daxter trilogy are the talk of the town, and yesterday a beloved Zelda game got the native port treatment: Twilight Princess.
This might sound familiar if you caught the showcase for Twilight Princess: Courage Reborn we shared recently, but this is actually a different project called Dusk. The basics will be familiar if you’ve toyed around with any of these ports before: you need to bring your own game files from either the NTSC or PAL releases of the GameCube version, but plug those in and you’re off to the races.
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It boasts an impressive feature list, especially given that it also supports iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux for you Steam Deck sickos out there. Dusk supports higher framerates, mouse or gyro aiming, custom models and texture packs, and features that came in with the WiiU version like Mirror Mode—also known as “the original Wii port.”
The trailer also shows off a huge list of gameplay settings to tweak—everything from quality-of-life options like instant text and autosaves to a damage multiplier in case you want to make the game absurdly hard. At the end of the trailer there’s a tease for a randomizer mode, so I’m sure we’re in for some silly stream highlights soon enough.
“When we started the Twilight Princess decompilation project in August 2020, it was hard to imagine it would ever be finished, much less to see it used for a project like this,” reads a release blog from the Dusk team. “Years and years of effort have been poured into the decompilation by contributors all over the world, resulting in the largest decompilation project ever completed.”
I’m going to let them fight it out with the Open GOAL people who ported the entire Jak & Daxter series to PC on that last claim, but it’s no skin off my back. It’s nice to think about a future where a bunch of retro classics have native PC ports complete with dedicated modding scenes and a team of volunteers actively adding new features, and it’s no surprise that Zelda was early to the party and continues to be the life of it.
The action-adventure series was inspiring efforts like this all the way back in 1999, when a hobby programmer tried to bring the pioneering NES game to PC with all-original code. It’s a pretty great story!
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