Editor’s note (updated Nov. 6, 6:00 p.m.): text expanded with the technical details of the PS5 and PC demos, the historical reaction of Nintendo and Sony, the risks and the official way to play; passage on the legal situation corrected. Sources: Notebookcheck, Glitched and Polygon.
Zelda Ocarina Remake launched less than 48 hours ago and is already running on other devices, unofficially.
The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time arrived on the Nintendo Switch 2 on Wednesday (the 5th) and, a little over a day later, it has already shown up booting on a jailbroken PlayStation 5 and on PC emulators.
Things around PlayStation were already heated: ever since Sony announced the end of physical media, part of the community has protested and even organized a boycott, the “PlayStation Digital Blackout”, which according to Polygon had no effect on sales. At the same time, the homebrew scene found a flaw in the PS5 system and managed to jailbreak the console, opening the door to running code not authorized by Sony, as we reported here.
What happened
With AI making things so easy these days, a lot of people started tinkering with existing emulators, adding features and porting them to other platforms. A developer who goes by Vampinity posted a short video on GitHub in which Link leaves his house in Kokiri Forest running on EglantinePS5, an experimental PS5 adaptation of the Switch 2 emulator Eglantine, which was born from Eden, an emulator for the original Switch.
But hold on: you still can’t really play it. The frame rate barely passes 20 fps, heavy fog covers the forest and the game crashes shortly after; the author admits as much and asks the community for help, according to Notebookcheck and Glitched. The challenge is huge, because the Switch 2 uses an Arm-architecture processor and the PS5 uses AMD’s x86, so every instruction has to be translated in real time. On PC, the remake showed up on launch day in the Lichii emulator, with cutscenes at around 60 fps and the game itself dropping to nearly 25 fps, with missing textures and flickering light.
How Nintendo and Sony reacted
Nintendo has not commented on the case, but the track record is well known: in 2024 the company reached a US$ 2.4 million settlement with the creators of the Yuzu emulator, and Ryujinx ended development months later, after Nintendo got in touch. Sony has been releasing security updates for the PS5 one after another, and a jailbroken console has to stay on an old system version, with no PlayStation Network or PS Store.
Is it piracy?
All of this is done unofficially. Using a copy of a game you didn’t buy is piracy, no debate. Even with a copy dumped from your own cartridge, the legal situation is gray: Brazilian copyright law (Lei 9.610/98) forbids circumventing protection locks, and jailbreaking the console violates Nintendo’s and Sony’s terms of use. And the risks are real: bans for the console and the account, loss of warranty, a bricked device and fake files with malware using the names of these projects.
How to play it the official way
The remake is exclusive to the Switch 2 and costs R$ 329,90 on the Brazilian eShop, at about 27 GB, as we detailed in the Ocarina of Time launch guide. For those who enjoy preservation within the rules, our guide to games ported to browser and PC collects projects that don’t distribute commercial games.
SavePoint reports that this exists and why it draws attention, but does not point to where to download it or how to do it.
Sources: Notebookcheck and Glitched, based on the video published by the developer; Polygon; Nintendo (official game page).
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