The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess now has an unofficial PC version

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess now has a fully functional PC version

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been successfully reverse-engineered, allowing modders to create new, unofficial versions of the game for Windows PC, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android. With the Dusk project, Twilight Princess is now playable at higher resolutions, higher framerates, and a ton of quality-of-life improvements.

Thanks to interpolation, Twilight Princess can now features an unlocked framerate. The game can also supports high-resolution texture packs and other modifications. Right now, the game needs a North American (NTSC) or European (PAL) GameCube ROM for Twilight Princess to operate. However, support for other versions of Twilight Princess is in the works.

Below is the Dusk team’s explanation for how Twilight Princess supports an unlocked framerate on modern hardware.

How does Dusk achieve higher frame rates than the original game?

Dusk essentially allows the game to render frames at a faster rate than which the game world updates (or “ticks”). Much like the original game, Dusk still ticks 30 times per second. This ensures that the game is faithful to the original experience and behaves as expected, which is important to certain types of players like speedrunners.

When the frame rate is faster than the tick rate, you end up having to render frames between ticks – even though the game world isn’t actually updating. Dusk uses information about how objects are moving through the world to create a close approximation of what the world would look like at that moment in time and renders that. This is very similar to how many modern, well-built game engines work.

This approach is referred to by the Dusk developers and members of the community as “interpolation”. However, this should not to be confused with other forms of interpolation, like the “Frame Generation” technology offered by modern GPUs.

Nintendo can’t do anything about these unofficial versions

These new versions of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess are not distributed as a complete project. Since this project does not use Nintendo assets, they have no grounds to remove it from GitHub. To play these new versions of Twilight Princess, you will need to provide your own ROM for Twilight Princess. Right now, only certain versions of Twilight Princess can work with this project. However, there are plans to support more versions of the game in the future.

More information about the Dusk project is available on GitHub and the project’s website.

You can join the discussion on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’ unofficial PC port on the OC3D Forums.