Overview
Hey, listen! Emulating Nintendo 64 games is a total pain in the ass, so I put this guide together to help folks configure Ship of Harkinian, an extremely popular open source port of Ocarina of Time that builds a modern, easy-to-use port of the game using the assets from the original release.
Installation should take around 5–10 minutes, with an equal amount of time dedicated to perusing graphics settings and configuring your controller.
Installation
- Download the latest release of Ship of Harkinian and extract it someplace you'll remember.
- Legally dump a supported copy of Ocarina of Time and place it in the
SoH-Copper-Charlie-Win64folder you extracted in the previous step. - Launch
SoH-Copper-Charlie-Win64\soh.exeand promise Windows Defender that the program is safe (it is, but signing an executable to be officially recognized as safe is very expensive). - Click "Yes" when asked if you'd like to generate an OTR file.
- Click "Yes" when asked if you'd like to look for a ROM file, then select your
Legend of Zelda, The - Ocarina of Time (USA).z64from earlier. - Wait for the
soh.exeCommand Prompt window to finish building the game. - Click "No" when asked if you'd like to extract another ROM.
Job done! The game will now open automatically. You can relaunch the game in the future by opening soh.exe.
Configuration
Once the game is open, you can press Escape to access the SoH settings menus.
Essential Tweaks
Ocarina of Time is an old game filled with a bunch of software bugs that can lead to confusion/cause gameplay to suddenly come screeching to a halt. To fix this in as few clicks as possible, head to Settings > Presets > find Main Vanilla+ > click Apply. Tons of gameplay fixes and quality of life features have now been applied to your game.
Next, let's uncap the original 20 FPS framerate by going into Settings > Graphics and ensuring that Match Refresh Rate is checked. While you're in here, I suggest clicking Toggle Fullscreen to put the game into borderless fullscreen for easy game capture.
Extra Tweaks
If you want to preserve the original N64 aspect ratio and resolution while keeping the higher framerate, you can do this in Enhancements > Graphics > Misc column > enable N64 mode. Otherwise, you can change the aspect ratio and resolution independently in Settings > Graphics > Advanced Graphics Options column > checking Enable advanced settings and changing the settings there.
This should be a great baseline for your playthrough, but feel free to poke around the menus here.
Controller Setup
By default, Ship of Harkinian should automatically recognize connected controllers, with custom key bindings available in Settings > Controls. In my case, I'm using an older Xbox One S controller connected to the PC using an official wireless adapter. Here's a screenshot of what I see when I open this menu:
Conclusion
That's the whole thing. I hope this helps!