Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation
Link can already run through Kokiri Forest on a PC in the new Ocarina of Time. In one early test, the forest appears, the grass casts shadows, and the path looks inviting enough. Turn toward a different part of the woods and the scene washes out almost to white. Inside the Great Deku Tree, the same tester records a much cleaner view. That’s what the first week of Switch 2 emulation looks like up close. Original screenshots and test notes.
Nintendo released the remake for Switch 2 on November 5, 2026. The footage people are sharing shows the 2026 game running through Lichii, an experimental emulator. Our very own DashingDerek reviewed the console release late last week: OOT Switch 2 review.
What ran on launch day
Lichii’s build 75 notes describe two problems between starting the game and seeing Hyrule. First, the game had been aborting early on a 64-bit wait-on-address operation. That’s a synchronization operation that lets a thread sleep until a value in memory changes. The emulator has to reproduce the behavior the game expects from the console’s kernel, including how the wait is checked and how the thread wakes. Lichii brought in an Eglantine fix for the operation. The notes also report that around 80 previously rejected shaders could now translate, letting the 3D scene render past an earlier white screen. Lichii build 75 notes.
Unreal Gaming PC posted footage from a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 4080 system. In the first clip, the game clears the opening, but gameplay often lands around 20 to 30 fps with visible flicker and stutter. The follow-up shows sections running faster, roughly 30 to 60 fps, with uneven motion and visual issues still present. Those numbers describe the scenes shown on that PC. The two clips don’t provide a controlled benchmark across builds, GPUs, or the whole game. PC Gamer’s comparison of the two recordings.
Short clips also circulated on X. Vinas shared an early look, and @akakevinvro posted a separate clip claiming steadier 60 fps. The longer recordings make it easier to see what happens when the camera moves and the renderer encounters a new effect. Vinas’s post · The 60 fps claim.
Early emulation footage shared by @VinasExplosao
🚨 BIZARRO! ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME RODANDO NO PC!
— Vinas (@VinasExplosao) November 5, 2026
O jogo já teve seu dump realizado e está sendo executado no PC através de emulação. Sim, estamos falando de um game que ainda não lançou oficialmente rodando fora do hardware original da Nintendo! pic.twitter.com/giO956ssnI
ocarina of time huge performance boost pic.twitter.com/nw842LsVTd
— akakevin (@akakevinvro) November 5, 2026
Why getting to the forest was only the first hurdle
Switch 2 uses a custom NVIDIA processor with support for DLSS and ray tracing. On a typical x86-64 PC, the emulator has to translate guest Arm instructions and reproduce the console services that games call. It also has to interpret graphics commands and translate shaders for the host graphics backend. A fast PC can move more data and execute more work, but it still needs the emulator to tell it what that work is. Nintendo Switch 2 specifications · NVIDIA’s hardware overview.
One report in Lichii’s tracker illustrates the split between the game’s interface and its 3D world. The HUD could remain visible while gameplay underneath it rendered black. The interface was making it to the screen, while a different part of the rendering pipeline was failing. Other testers traced washed-out scenes by capturing the sequence of graphics passes that make up a frame. One Linux tester found that skipping a fog pass removed the haze while leaving other artifacts. Removing another layer changed the picture again, but also darkened the river. That helped narrow the search while showing why disabling the effect would be a poor permanent fix. HUD and black-screen report · Frame-dump investigation.
The screenshots above came from one community report and show different scenes, camera angles, and graphics modes. They document what the tester saw. A cleaner indoor shot at a higher frame rate says little about the cost of drawing an outdoor forest full of vegetation, fog, and moving shadows. Tester hardware, settings, and screenshots.
What changed by build 125
By November 9, Lichii’s build 125 notes listed fixes for flickering water, missing geometry after a deferred clear, cutscene playback, and a texture-cache crash. They also describe compiling shaders before gameplay and carrying compatible pipeline-cache records forward between builds. Precompiling moves some work to startup so it doesn’t have to interrupt the first appearance of an effect. A cache can reduce that cost on later runs, which is one reason a second trip down the same path can feel smoother than the first. Lichii build 125 notes.
Frame pacing is another part of the picture. At 60 fps, a steady stream of frames arrives about every 16.7 milliseconds. A counter can show 60 during a smooth passage and miss a long stall when a new scene loads or a driver compiles a pipeline. For a useful comparison, record the same route with the same game update, resolution, graphics settings, and driver. Note whether the shader cache was already warm. Then look at a frame-time graph and check that the same objects, effects, and cutscenes actually appear in both runs.
Lichii’s Windows releases also offer a PGO build, short for profile-guided optimization. The compiler uses information collected from a training run to prioritize code paths that ran frequently. The Windows profile was trained on Ocarina of Time, so a gain there gives you little basis for predicting the same improvement in a different game. Windows build and profile details.
The broader Switch 2 picture
Lichii branches from Eglantine, which credits Eden, yuzu, and Sudachi in its lineage. That earlier work gives the developers a starting point for CPU translation, graphics, and system services. The Switch 2 changes still need testing game by game. Eglantine documents progress with Mario Kart World and Splatoon Raiders. Lichii’s build 125 notes report restored water behavior in Mario Kart World and an increase from 11.7 to 14.8 fps at one Donkey Kong Bananza test spot. That modest Bananza result is a good counterweight to a fast clip of Zelda. Lichii source · Eglantine source and compatibility notes · Build 125 game-specific changes.
There’s a familiar echo here for anyone who remembers seeing the 1998 game on a PC through UltraHLE. The new footage shows Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake, with a different executable, hardware target, and set of problems. This time you can read the bug reports while people are still arguing about which pass turned the forest white. The original Nintendo 64 release · Retro Replay’s UltraHLE history.
