The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake now runs surprisingly well on phones after just a week of additional emulator development.
Legend of Zelda fans all over the world have been marveling at the Ocarina of Time remake’s visuals and enhanced gameplay systems on the Nintendo Switch 2, but the Android emulator scene has been busy marveling over something just a little bit different. One Redditor got the latest Zelda game running on Banana Native, a free emulator that’s available right now on GitHub.
Ocarina of Time remake performance has now reached a major milestone into the 30 FPS territory with frame gen, which means the game is actually running at around 15 FPS, but then scaled and interpolated using AI frame generation to appear like 30 FPS. Banana Native isn’t a traditional emulator, as it doesn’t emulate hardware. Rather, it uses the game’s own ARM64 code to run on the phone’s CPU. The Switch 2 is powered by a mobile Nvidia chip, after all.
The user is running the Ocarina of Time remake on a Poco F7 Ultra, which sports a two-generation-old Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) processor. The latest phones that are coming out, like the Redmagic 12 Pro, run a 6th-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme chip, so performance could be a lot better on a newer phone. Apps like Banana Native require specific driver support for each phone to run, and as I pointed out in my Redmagic 12 Pro review, platforms like Droid Deck and Game Native don’t yet have proper drivers for the newest chips.
9to5Google’s Damien Wilde recently reviewed Droid Deck, another native-type emulator that lets you legally play Steam games you own on your phone by just signing into your Steam account. It works extremely well on lots of Android phones and helps showcase just how far Android emulation has come this year.
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