Both versions of Wind Waker now run natively on modded Switch, and the GameCube port gets a 60 fps mode

SwitchWaker, built from the GameCube decompilation, and SwitchWakerHD, a recompilation of the Wii U remaster, both run without emulation and need your own copy of the game.

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Two unofficial native ports of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker are now out for Switch consoles running custom firmware, both from the GitHub organisation centollOS. SwitchWaker runs the 2002 GameCube game, and SwitchWakerHD runs the 2013 Wii U remaster. Neither is an emulator. The first releases went up on 7 October, and both projects have shipped several updates since.

Two routes to the same island

SwitchWaker is compiled from the game's decompilation. Its README credits the community project zeldaret/tww for almost all of the game code, with the remaining functions taken from a personal fork, snrubrm/tww, whose author completed them with AI-assisted decompilation. Graphics go through Aurora, a reimplementation of the GameCube SDK, and audio through Dolphin's DSP code. The README is upfront that nearly all of the project's own code outside the game folder was written by Anthropic's Claude through Claude Code, with the human authors reviewing it line by line and testing on a real Switch. Anyone who wants only human-written decompilation is pointed back to zeldaret/tww.

SwitchWakerHD takes the other route. It is a fork of ZeldaWWHDRecomp: the Wii U game's PowerPC code is translated to C ahead of time, the Cafe OS libraries it calls are reimplemented, and its graphics are drawn with deko3d, the Switch's own GPU API.

What the latest builds add

SwitchWaker 0.3.0, released on 10 October, added an experimental 60 fps mode. The game still runs 30 game frames per second and the frames in between are interpolated. The notes say it holds 60 in most places in handheld mode, but docked at 1080p the GPU cannot keep up in most places, so the team recommends leaving it off on a TV for now. The same update made camera shake and the heat haze over lava optional, both off by default. Version 0.3.1 followed on 11 October with a fix for a crash in Jabun's cave.

SwitchWakerHD 0.4.3, also out on 10 October, makes the controllers act as the Wii U GamePad in Off-TV Play, so the Switch touchscreen becomes the GamePad screen for dragging items and tapping the map, with gyro aiming as before. The team measured Outset Island at 29.9 fps on a stock console in handheld mode. Version 0.4.1 had already added the European release in its five languages.

What you need

Both ports require your own copy of the game, and neither repository contains game assets. SwitchWaker is a download that reads the USA disc, revision 0, from an uncompressed ISO on the SD card at every start. SwitchWakerHD offers no ready-made binaries because each build carries the recompiled game code, so players build it on a computer from their own Wii U dump with a single script. The first start then spends about 20 minutes compiling roughly three quarters of the game's shaders on the console.

Sources

Image: FullMetalMaster via GitHub

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