The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, running natively on iPhone and iPad.
A static recompilation of the GameCube original, with Metal rendering, touch controls, controllers and mods.

Questions or bugs? Join the Discord or open an issue.

Wind Waker Recomp, Elliott's fork of BlueWake, is moving here, and Elliott and Chris now maintain BlueWake together. His work is being brought in with his authorship. How the move works: migration log and status.

• Report bugs and request features in BlueWake's issues, not on Wind-Waker-Recomp. Say whether you use a Wind Waker Recomp release or a BlueWake build, and attach your session log. Open issues there are being moved here with a link back.
• Your Windows saves carry over: both keep them in %APPDATA%\BlueWake. Back that folder up before switching.
• Windows: the same ready-made build as Wind Waker Recomp 0.4.0 is on BlueWake's Releases page. Unpack it, run BlueWake.exe and choose your disc image. A Dolphin .rvz must first be converted to ISO in Dolphin (right-click the game, Convert File).
• Questions: the Discord, shared by both projects.

The measurements below describe earlier developer builds; they are not acceptance of every personal player build. Windows and Apple TV remain experimental.

BlueWake translates the game's PowerPC code, the main executable and all 415 of its modules, into native arm64 code ahead of time, on your Mac. The app runs that code with a compatibility runtime for the GameCube's hardware: memory and timing, disc and memory card, controllers, DSP audio, and graphics through Metal. Nothing is compiled on the device while you play, so it needs no JIT; the few rare instructions the translator does not handle fall back to an interpreter.

The runtime is derived from Dolphin and keeps an interpreter fallback, so BlueWake is a static recompilation with a hardware compatibility layer, not an "emulation-free" rewrite.

• Tested areas and features: the opening and prologue, Outset Island, sailing the Great Sea, Windfall, a late-game Hyrule save, menus, and saving and reloading through the game's own memory card
• Developer build: 30 FPS at full speed on an iPad Pro (M2), the game's native frame rate, with stereo audio
• Touch controls with a layout editor, opacity and size settings
• Game controllers and keyboards, with camera inversion and button remapping
• The ⋯ menu: FPS display, render resolution up to 4×, texture filtering up to 16× anisotropic, aspect ratio, mods, save backup and restore, and Report a Problem
• Mods: 16:9 widescreen, Dolphin-format HD texture packs and Better Wind Waker

Later dungeons and boss fights are still largely untested. If you find a problem there, please report it.

These measurements come from the developer build. Much of its speed comes from an optimization profile: a record of which parts of the game's code run most, which the compiler uses to arrange that code for speed. That profile is made from the game itself, so it cannot be published. Instead, the builder makes your own: it runs the game briefly on your Mac, records the same kind of counts, then compiles your app with them. On the Mac, an app built this way ran the same test route slightly faster than the developer build; iPad frame-rate tests of it are still to come. Without the profile (--no-train), the game runs at about 27.5 FPS instead of 30 at the Outset Island pier on the iPad Pro (M2).

In the measured slow scenes, the CPU is the main limit, so lowering render resolution alone has not recovered full speed. Other scenes and HD texture packs can have different limits. Performance on smaller devices is active work.

You need:

• a Mac with Apple silicon, Xcode, CMake and Ninja, and at least 25 GB of free disk space (PadMint's required disk-space check, not a measured peak-space guarantee)
• your GZLE01 revision 0 disc image
• an A13 or newer iPhone or iPad on iOS/iPadOS 17 or later, with Developer Mode on
• Or an Apple TV on tvOS 17 or later, with Developer Mode on (Apple TV build guide)
• an Apple ID for signing (a free one works; its apps expire after seven days)

PadMint's BlueWake workflow starts from the app-only IPA on the Releases page, which is older than current main. For the latest changes, use the source builder below.

From this repository, one command builds your own personal app from a fresh checkout:

scripts/builder/build.sh "/path/to/The Legend Of Zelda The Wind Waker.iso" --ipa build/BlueWake.ipa

It fetches the pinned runtime and translator, checks your disc, translates the game from it, tunes it on your Mac, compiles it for iOS and writes an unsigned IPA. Install that with Sideloadly, AltStore, SideStore or Xcode, then copy the same disc image to your device (Finder › your device › Files › BlueWake); BlueWake imports it on first launch. Expect a first build of well over an hour on a fast Mac, longer on smaller ones; the terminal shows each stage and its elapsed time, and completed work is reused if you stop and rerun the same command. Run it with --source-only first to check your tools and disc in a few minutes.

The IPA you build contains code translated from your disc: it is yours alone. Never share or upload it.

Step by step, with updating and troubleshooting: Build your own BlueWake. Signing with your own identity and other options: docs/status/DEVICE_BUILD.md. For Apple TV, use the tvOS build guide; it builds and installs directly with devicectl.

Download: the ready-made Windows build is on the Releases page: unpack it, run BlueWake.exe and choose your .iso or .gcm disc image. To build it yourself instead:

An experimental native Windows x86-64 source port targets Direct3D 12, using the same disc and verified game source. The runtime/app compile and link pass native Windows CI; end-to-end personal-module build and Direct3D gameplay validation remain pending. To try it with Visual Studio's C++ workload and its Clang component, Python, Git, CMake and Ninja:

python scripts/windows/build.py "D:\Games\The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker (USA).rvz"

It accepts an .iso or a Dolphin .rvz and writes build\windows\BlueWake\BlueWake.exe, a personal build like the IPA: never share it. See BlueWake on Windows, or Windows launch troubleshooting below.

On iPhone/iPad, open ⋯ › Mods; on Windows, press F1 and open Mods. Each mod applies the next time BlueWake starts and never changes your saves.

Code mods cannot be applied to a statically recompiled game at runtime, so they are translated and built into the app. Details are in docs/MODS.md.

Smooth Motion (Experimental) adds in-between rendered frames while gameplay stays at 30 updates per second. It is off by default; see how interpolation works. ⋯ › Gameplay adds optional Jump & Sprint, Fast Transitions and Quick Doors. These apply at the next launch and start off. Jump and Run appear as editable touch buttons when movement extras are enabled; keyboards use Space and Shift, and controllers use the left bumper and left-stick click. Jump uses the game's ledge jump and respects its movement restrictions.

The rendering, camera, movement, transition and game-option additions come from elliotttate's source fork, with original commit authorship retained. Integration status distinguishes BlueWake's checks from the fork's reported measurements. Rebuild your personal game module for the new Better Wind Waker settings and 16:10 variants; an older module does not gain those variants from an app update.

• Saves live in GZLE01.card: On My iPad/iPhone › BlueWake › BlueWake in Files, or %APPDATA%\BlueWake on Windows (paste that path into File Explorer's address bar).
• On iPhone/iPad, ⋯ › Game Data & Saves › Back Up Saves… exports a copy; Restore Saves… brings one back and keeps a copy of your current saves in a Backups folder first.
• On Windows, close BlueWake before copying or replacing the card, and keep a backup outside its data folder.
• Moving from Dolphin? See Dolphin save import below; renaming a .gci is not conversion.
• Install updates over the existing app. Deleting BlueWake deletes its saves, so back them up first.
• Remove Disc Image… frees the space used by the disc and the files made from it. Saves, mods and settings stay. You must import your disc again before playing.

• Loading hitches. Changing areas can briefly stall; remaining loading and rendering costs are still being investigated.
• First visits to new areas. A bundled cache covers the areas tested so far; elsewhere, some objects may take a moment to appear the first time.
• Busy scenes on iPhone drop below 30 FPS on chips older than the M-series iPads.

• Discord: discord.gg/xwHfUD2bxW for questions, testing and updates
• Bug reports: ⋯ › Help & Feedback › Report a Problem on GitHub opens a prefilled issue. Say which device, where in the game it happened and what you saw, and attach the session log (Share Session Log, same menu). Please do not attach game files or disc images.

On Windows, yes: the Releases page has a ready-made build that needs your own disc image. On Mac, iPhone and iPad, build a personal app from source with your own disc (see Getting started). Never share an app you build yourself: it contains translated game code. An app-only build without your module shows "Translated game code: Missing".

The game's code is translated from your disc during the build, and the game's graphics, sound and world data are read from your disc on the device. Neither is included here.

Only the GameCube USA release, GZLE01 revision 0. The build checks the disc and refuses others. The Wii U Wind Waker HD is a different game and is not supported.

Not in the usual sense. The game's code is translated to native arm64 ahead of time and there is no JIT; only a few rare instructions fall back to an interpreter. The hardware around the CPU (graphics, audio, memory card, timing) comes from a Dolphin-derived runtime.

That is the game's own frame rate on the GameCube. BlueWake targets that frame rate at 100% game speed; raising the speed would make gameplay run faster too.

Extract the pack first. Its GZL folder contains the textures; keep the tex1_… PNG/DDS filenames and the subfolders inside it.

• Windows: press F1 › Mods › Open the texture folder, or open %APPDATA%\BlueWake\Load\Textures\GZLE01. Copy GZL into it, giving …\GZLE01\GZL\…\tex1_….dds (or .png). Enable HD texture pack and restart BlueWake.
• iPhone/iPad: use ⋯ › Mods › Install Texture Pack… and select GZL in Files, then enable HD Texture Pack and restart. For manual copying, put GZL under On My iPad/iPhone › BlueWake › BlueWake › Load › Textures › GZLE01.

Subfolders are searched recursively, so an extra Hypatia WWHD Mod… folder does not itself prevent loading. Keep unused Optional Textures outside the installed texture folder, though: they can contain competing replacements for the same texture. Add only the variants you choose. The pack's WideScreen Patch folder is not needed; use BlueWake's built-in widescreen setting. For a smaller pack on iPhone/iPad, see Mods.

The symptom alone does not identify the cause. These steps apply to this repository's experimental Windows port; include the repository/fork and exact build version when reporting it.

1. Run the executable from the complete personal build folder, not by itself or from inside an archive. Keep the builder's runtime DLLs, gGZLE01_recomp.dll and game folder together.
2. Open %APPDATA%\BlueWake\logs in File Explorer. Attach the newest session-*.log and, if present, the matching crash-*.log. If no new log appears, say so; Windows may be failing before BlueWake's logging starts. Include any Windows error message, your CPU/GPU and Windows version.
3. Check the Windows requirements. If Windows names a missing DLL, restore the complete build output; do not collect DLLs from random download sites. A missing gGZLE01_recomp.dll requires building your own game module from your disc.

Do not delete %APPDATA%\BlueWake to troubleshoot: it holds your saves and settings.

BlueWake matches objects between consecutive game frames, interpolates their transforms and supported vertex motion, then renders extra views of the scene. Game logic stays at 30 updates per second. This is geometry-based rendering interpolation, in the same broad category as other Zelda ports' renderer interpolation; it does not mean their implementations are identical. BlueWake uses no AI image generation or NVIDIA DLSS, and it does not simply crossfade two finished screenshots.

On iPhone/iPad, ⋯ › Display › Smooth Motion (Experimental) offers 60 FPS and, on ProMotion screens, 120 FPS. The desktop settings also offer Match the display, up to 240 FPS. These are presentation targets, not guarantees or faster game logic. Unmatched objects and camera cuts can skip interpolation. It is experimental and off by default; disable it if you see artifacts or worse performance.

Yes, on an A13 or newer. The touch controls sit in the black bars beside the picture. The busiest scenes dip below 30 FPS on an iPhone 14; see Performance.

Yes. Controllers that iOS supports work, with camera inversion and button remapping under ⋯ › Controller, and the game's rumble is passed to the controller.

Yes, as long as you install over the existing app. Use Back Up Saves… before anything else, and never delete the app to update it.

Yes, for USA (GZLE01) in-game saves. Export a .gci from Dolphin's Tools › Memory Card Manager or use its existing .gci file. Dolphin save states are not supported by this importer.

• iPhone/iPad: copy the save to your device and open ⋯ › Game Data & Saves › Import Dolphin Save…. Pick the source quest log and destination BlueWake slot; the app backs up your current card first. The importer also accepts Dolphin .raw cards.
• Windows: this port currently has no Import Dolphin Save screen. A .gci must be imported into BlueWake's GZLE01.card container; renaming it to .card will not work. Source users can use the repository's save-import command-line helper, which uses the same importer as iOS. Community converters are separate tools, not required by the iOS app or validated by this README.

Always close BlueWake and back up the destination card before a manual import. Work on a copy, check the resulting quest logs, then put the converted card at %APPDATA%\BlueWake\GZLE01.card on Windows. Importing into an existing game save replaces only the selected slot; a card with no Wind Waker save receives the whole imported save, including all three slots.

• Migration status: the move from Wind-Waker-Recomp, and what is open
• Current status: the engineering log, newest first
• Build your own BlueWake: the player's guide
• BlueWake on Windows: building and playing on a Windows PC
• Apple TV build: build and install the controller-first tvOS app
• The Builder: how the build works, and reusing it for other ports
• Device build: signing, installing and build options
• Mods: the three mods and how code mods are built
• History: the project's earlier README, from macOS prototype to iPad
• Porting history and legal and provenance

• Dolphin: the compatibility runtime, DSP audio and texture-pack format come from it, and its GZLE01 game settings supply the widescreen code
• RecompCore and DolRecomp, forked for BlueWake, with the Aurora renderer and Dawn
• zeldaret/tww, the Wind Waker decompilation, for research
• Better Wind Waker by WideBoner
• HD texture pack authors, including Hypatia
• SunPad, whose touch control overlay BlueWake adapts
• Elliott (@elliotttate), for the rendering, desktop, gameplay and performance enhancements being consolidated into BlueWake from his Wind Waker fork
• Ian MacFarlane (@iannotian), for the controller-first Apple TV contribution

BlueWake is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later, the license its Dolphin-derived runtime and SunPad-derived touch controls allow together. See RIGHTS_AND_LICENSES.md for the details and for game content.

BlueWake is an independent fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo. The Legend of Zelda, The Wind Waker and GameCube are trademarks of Nintendo. You need your own legally obtained disc and are responsible for following the laws that apply to it.