Modder releases unofficial native PC port of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Windows users can now play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom without a Switch emulator after a fan-made native port appeared on GitHub. Called SkyboundTOTK, the project comes from a modder known as NotRexed, who co-owns Wasm.rip, a group that brings games, emulators, and tools to web browsers.

SkyboundTOTK arrives six days after Savage Wind Recomp, a separate fan project that brought Breath of the Wild to Windows as a native application. Both entries in Nintendo’s modern Hyrule duology can now run on PC hardware without an emulation layer, although the Breath of the Wild port remains an early alpha that has only been tested through the Great Plateau opening area.

NotRexed first previewed the work in mid-October, sharing screenshots on X and stating that the game had been recompiled for PC. Those early builds ran at between 32 and 59fps on a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. NotRexed described performance at the time as sluggish, noted that the project was only two to three days old, and estimated a public release within two to four weeks.

Recompilation takes a different route from emulation. An emulator imitates the Switch’s hardware in real time, while recompilation translates the game’s original machine code into a program that runs directly on a PC processor. The technique sits behind a run of unofficial Nintendo ports this year, including Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

SkyboundTOTK supports AMD’s FSR 1 upscaling alongside adjustable image sharpening. An experimental frame interpolation mode inserts generated frames between rendered ones to smooth motion. The feature raises the displayed frame rate without speeding up the underlying game simulation, and it can add input latency and produce visual artifacts during fast movement and on menus.

An experimental ultrawide mode adjusts the field of view and HUD layout for wider monitors, though it may stretch the image on some configurations. Display settings cover full-screen and windowed modes, a choice between preserving the original aspect ratio or stretching the image to fill the screen, and the option to save display preferences for later sessions.

Keyboard and mouse controls handle movement, camera, combat, and other in-game actions, with mouse capture and sensitivity adjustments included. Compatible gamepads are also supported. A local graphics cache speeds up subsequent sessions, but it does not remove stutter entirely, and some hitching can still occur as new areas load and shaders compile.

SkyboundTOTK is distributed as source code rather than a ready-to-run executable. Players must compile it themselves on Windows 10 or Windows 11 using the required development tools, a process that can take a long time and needs at least 45GB of free storage on top of the game files. The port also requires a legally obtained, extracted copy of the game’s base 1.0.0 release. Later versions are not supported by its current game-specific code, and the project ships without any game files, keys, or save data.

No action had been taken against NotRexed when the October preview spread online, which is interesting since Nintendo has a record of pursuing Switch emulation in court. In March 2024, the developers of the Yuzu emulator agreed to pay $2.4 million and shut the project down to settle a lawsuit brought by the company.

A separate recompilation project targeting Apple Silicon Macs has reached 90fps during gameplay, outpacing both the official Switch 2 Edition and the early PC builds NotRexed showed in October. Tears of the Kingdom launched on the Nintendo Switch on May 12, 2023, and received an enhanced Nintendo Switch 2 Edition in June 2025. Nintendo has not released the game, or its predecessor Breath of the Wild, on PC.