The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, arguably the best Zelda game, has now been unofficially ported to PC, and that’s great news for the future of this absolute classic.
I won’t mince words here: obviously, you’ve been able to play Link to the Past on PC for decades via emulation. But whereas an emulator will essentially run a virtual Super NES on your computer to play, this Link to the Past port runs natively on your PC, just like any modern computer game. The port takes advantage of the technology developed for the LakeSNES emulator, but does not depend on it.
For developers, it’s an engineering challenge, but for gamers, it opens up a lot of new possibilities for mods and quality of life features. Out of the box, this version of Link to the Past lets you equip multiple sub-items at once, a feature the series didn’t have before the N64 games. There’s a built-in turbo mode, tricks, and yes, widescreen support. You can view the details of these features in the
The project started to gain popularity after Neowin (opens in a new tab) highlighted it a week ago and is already improved by contributors. A new Zelda 3 Launcher app completely simplifies the complicated installation process: all you have to do is provide the correct ROM and the launcher takes care of the rest. The only caveat is that you need an extremely specific ROM version.
As with many other such PC ports, such as those of Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, this version contains none of the elements of the original game; instead they are extracted from the ROM you provide. Nintendo hasn’t taken action against these N64 ports, so maybe this strategy to avoid legal wrath is working. But if you’re eager to try it out before a potential retirement, you can get the PC port (opens in a new tab) or the Zelda 3 launcher (opens in a new tab) from those respective GitHub links.