i will not lie and say i would love to see it look even better on CEMU. i just hope people aren't shitty about it and have legit copies at least (they won't). edit too: i know you were cool OP as you immediately said you got it for wii u in your post, no worries.

i guess i was a fool and bought an entirely new console for it that sadly is ridiculed by some of the crowd that typically follows said emulation, but screw them as i'm enjoying it intensely and can take it with me anywhere easily.

I'm generally very tolerant of framerate inconsistency. I grew up playing a lot of PC games on old PC hardware where anything above a single digit framerate was often considered playable. So I haven't been bothered at all by what I've played of the WiiU version of BotW.

But for now, I'm waiting to play more of Zelda until Hard Mode arrives. If, by that time, the game is fully playable on CEMU, offering a better experience than native hardware can provide, then I might as well see about playing it emulated. I've already got all my WiiU games ripped and catalogued on my PC. I keep all the original discs in their boxes and just run the games off an SD card.

I also bought a new console just to play Zelda. Was it risky to spend hundreds of dollars based on one game and hoping there are other games in the future on that system that might interest you? Heck yeah it is. But don't feel bad or foolish for supporting the people who are making the games we are enjoying. Screw them indeed.

The best thing that I've seen come out of this is you can hack the Japanese voice acting with English subtitles already. Still baffles me Nintendo didn't offer that.

Isn't there some motion control stuff in the game? How would that work with a standard Xbox gamepad?

@ivdamke: That is weird. I wish I could do that, the voice of Zelda is truly terrible.

Nintendo being Nintendo. It's like for every 10 smart and innovative things they do, they have to do one thing that's incredibly dumb and out-of-touch.

@troll93: I am currently playing it on CEMU. It is very messed up but still totally viable. I can currently run the game at a solid 30+fps, but it takes some jank to do. Keep in mind that with the release of CEMU 1.7.4 in a week, this will be less than necessary to do. but if you'd like to play today, here's a checklist of things you'll need to get you started. You will need at least 12 gigs of ram for this method. If you don't have that much ram, don't download ramdisk and skip to step 2. The game should still run fine.

Mod Edit: Links deleted.

1. install primo ramdisk. Open the program, and create a new RAMDISK. A ramdisk is a storage partition you're creating on your Ram stick. Like a disk on your ram. We are going to put the CEMU program here so that we can run the game much faster. Create a new one with the icon in the top left- you'll wanna give it at least a gig of space. Make sure it's a FAT32 "DIRECT-IO" disk. Mash 'next', you should find a new drive on your PC called "Z:" unless you changed it.

2. Install cheat engine, if you haven't already. Start it up.

3. Unzip Cemu to the Z: drive (our new RAMDISK).

4. If you have like 64+ gigs of ram, you can also move your copy of BOTW to this disk. If not, skip ahead.

5. Start cemu from your Z: drive with admin privaleges. In the top left, click "options" and go to "input settings". connect your favorite game controller and map all the functions of the wii-u gamepad to your new controller. once you're ready, hit "file", "Load", find your copy of BOTW.

You should be in the game. Great!

6. Go to CheatEngine, click the bordered desktop icon in the top left of the window. Select the Cemu process - it should be near the bottom of the list and look something like "000c3ff-Cemu.exe". once it is selected, Tick the box labeled "enable speedhacks" in your cemu window, and set this to somewhere between 1-5 depending on the scene in the game. I'd recommend also going into cheatengine, and selecting "edit, settings" to set a hotkey on your keyboard for "speedhack speed +" and "speedhack speed -" as well as presets.

Once all that's done, you can return to the game.

Start up the game as normal and play through the tutorial section until you feel you've enjoyed enough of it. By now you will have noticed a couple of bugs but otherwise the game runs as normal. Well, you can't progress past the two tutorial shrines for your magnet / stasis powers, because those don't work. So go ahead and quit the game, and,

7. Find that BOTW save you downloaded earlier. extract the folders contents to your CEMU install, and then place the in folder "HLCm01/emulatorsaves/ (something like e45f585 or dg34904)" then rename the file to the parent folders' name, unless it already has the same name. when you reload the game, it should load up these other saves, which place you right after the shrines you just got to what you can't do.

REMEMBER WHERE THESE SAVES ARE BECAUSE RAMDISK IS RUNNING IN RAM! If you shut down or restart your computer that shit is GONE!

If you are running the game out of ramdisk, regularly back up this emulatorsaves folder to somewhere on your regular drive

If you have an SSD of sufficient speed, you really don't need to worry about RAMDISK, though it does increase speed a lot it's not vital.

enjoy playing the game! It's a mess in cemu until the release next week but god damn me if I've not put 20+ hours into this mess

I'm tempted to do this. I just for my switch last night.. booted Zelda up on the 65" screen.. then shut if off... "this is a god damn handheld grafix!" - it looked so bad on a big screen.

(the switch is fine as a handheld.. which i personally have no interest in...)

I do really want to try Zelda after all these great reviews....

Can i use my Nintendo Swtich pro controller on with the emu? I'm hoping yes as it seems to work fine in windows.

and to cover myself .. here is a pix to show that i own it :)

@troll93 I'm in the same boat, except I bought the Switch game without any plans to buy a Switch yet (due to the anemic game lineup so far and the performance issues with this game). The 1.7.4 release, which they showed of in a video, appears to have the game running at near solid 30 fps at 4K. That's pretty impressive considering they've been making steady progress since the game came only only a couple weeks ago. The only thing that I haven't yet looked into is how well the emulator runs with an Xbox One controller, or how it handles the motion control puzzles in the game. Fingers crossed that's all done well enough that it's playable.

@carpe_dmt: I just realized you might be able to answer my questions about the controller! Is it fully playable and compatible with an XBone controller? Couldn't get a clear answer anywhere, and was curious considering there are motion control puzzles in the game.

@wetracoon: yes it is fully compatible I am playing it on an xbone controller now - the motion control stuff is managed by the mouse, as would be anything related to touch, if the touchpad were used for anything in this game, only it's not. It sucks, but you can finish the motion control puzzles by right clicking on the screen and moving the mouse to simulate motion input. In a lot of ways it's a little more accurate for fine motions but good goddamn can you not control direction for shit

I had already put over 30 hours in before I read about how quickly the emulation was coming along. The framerate is a bummer and the aliasing is rough as hell, but I'm having such a great time with it. Seeing those videos of it running with AA and at 1080p though... oh man... fuck... :(

is the frame rate a hardware issue? ie, would a titan X(p) or a 1080 ti be 30fps too? i'd LOVE to play it in 4k! When this info first came out the 4k and 30fps was on a weakish card? gtx 770 or something...

Where does one get the 1.7.4 preview for CEMU? it is "out" the 4th.. but there preview is someplace.. or is just video of 1.7.4 out now? (it is 1.7.4 that has it "100% working")

also, how do i dump my BOTW from the cart to the PC? oh.. i guess i need the wii U version not the switch.. hrmm.. i really don't want to mess with iso hunting 'n stuff.. pooo...

Just as a heads up, while we do now allow some emulation discussion to happen, providing links to emulated and "possibly" pirated material is not allowed at all.

You'll just have to do the extra Google leg work.

Lol would be disappointing as dolphin has given so much more life to wii and GameCube games from me. Stuff I barely played or never got to.

It looks fine on my tv. It's not what I prefer right, but it's fine. The frame rate is definitely what really bothers me. It really fucking hits that 20fps and stays there hard when you're in those places or looking in those directions.

Still, id like to try my 3570k/1070 on some Wii U games. I bought basically the entire library I wanted back around Black Friday with a Wii U; a whole like 13 games heh.

Very much looking forward to this. At the moment I'm not convinced it'll be something I can do imminently (1.7.4 is Patreon only right now but I don't think that's going to be the public release where it's the way to play Zelda start to finish) but the progress being made (and CEMU working pretty hard to optimise around this one game) makes me hope to play my Wii U copy before the end of the year (without a 720p limit, which doesn't go great on a 4K TV with the original hardware). It seems like CEMU is already doing ok for providing options for using desktop-class GPU performance (much higher res, 16xAF) to really make the most of the assets in the game so it's down to fixing some bugs from emulation and then optimising to get performance to a solid 30fps (with a fast CPU - ie something that could handle Forza Horizon 3 last year seems ideal in terms of demanding single-thread performance).

TBH, I've never been totally happy with Dolphin (vs PCSX2) but possibly that's a familiarity issue (so many PS2 games in my collection plus so many people sharing settings and hexedits online) so it seems no bad thing that CEMU is doing good work on WiiU emulation.

I'm betting it'll take about 2 or 3 more versions of CEMU for it to be played reliably with good performance and without any game-breaking stuff.

So given the current speed of development I'm guessing like 2 more months or so.

It's a good game, it deserves to be played at higher than the laughable resolution and framerates the consoles provide.

Nintendo needs to keep prices down for their system to be viable as a toy, and they need to split the modest sum between screen, battery, chip, gimmick and profit margin. That forces them to buy Nvidia leftovers, with an old arch from a two generation old process node. This thing is made on 20 nm, while phones, CPUs and GPUs moved on 14nm/16ff while Samsung is already rolling out 10 nm for phones. Keeping up with technology is a piracy protection of sorts, just as providing a better experience / easy access.

Granted not a lot of people will have a highly clocked desktop PC with a ton of RAM to do the emulation, but that emulator is about to cost Nintendo tens of millions, given that Cemu is ready out of the gate and given that it's impossible to buy a switch at retail price. The much lauded system seller may become an unfortunate comparison once people see it running in glorious resolutions, working physics and all that grass which serves to hide the ugly ground textures. Granted seeing mobile graphics rendered natively and blown up on a big screen isn't always flattering.

If Cemu comes together and its dev isn't hired by Nintendo in the coming weeks, then we'll see emulation hitting the mainsteam for the first time.

@eurobum said:

Highly unlikely, not only they'll have to have a fairly decent PC to run it as you pointed, it will never be nowhere near as plug and play as main stream would require it to be.

It's still a third party software people have to look up and install, and then have a bunch of stuff to configure, map out the controllers, perhaps enable one or two game specific hacks to solve issues, I mean, you get the picture...

And as simple as that may sound to you and me it's almost sorcery to most regular end users out there.

Also let's not forget that you gotta have a backup copy on your PC to run it, and whatever it is the way you acquire it, it's waaaaaay out of mainstream as well.

How is that not super, super backwards? Isn't big business supposed to serve the consumer? You don't owe them support. They have to deliver a good product first, then you pay them for that good product. Nintendo isn't a charity. Nintendo is a lot of businessmen wanting your money.

Really bothers me that so many people seem willing to be used as cash cows.

@probablytuna: Your comment here is irrelevant. Saying that you make multiple bad consumer actions doesn't somehow lessen this one.

Several comments that were way off topic and discussing piracy and whether or not emulating games somehow condoned or promoted piracy have been removed.

This topic isn't about pirating Breath of the Wild or the "moral" implications of emulating games on PC. Please keep it on topic.

As much as I would LOVE a PC version for this, running in 1080p 60 FPS I struggle to see a playable emulated version anytime soon. Some people are talking about weeks - I would say months, even years.

Emulating it so it boots up and is possible to run around without any major issues around the Great Plateau is one thing, but making it fully playable is another thing. At it's current state it's not playable. You can't finish the game since some core mechanics aren't working and the performance is bad on a monster PC. It needs a lot of hard work, so again, my prediction is it will take years, the game being huge doesn't help.

The developers are doing a great job and I'm impressed and happy that they are doing it. I just try to be realistic.

Is it just me or is CEMU a little bit sketchy? It seems to me they are capitalizing on Zelda and basically profiting off the fact that people are pirating the game. Yes, I know emulators are legal and the WiiU is essentially a dead system, but I will list why I get a bit annoyed with people evangelizing cemu.

1. Closed Source (rumors about stolen code from Nintendo)

2. Patreon is at 30,000 (month) - this seems to be mainly on the back of making Zelda work on PC

On too many boards i see this sentiment verbatim , "Screw Nintendo they should make Zelda avalible on PC, therefore it is morally ok to pirate the game and never buy it, plus Jim Sterling said it is ok.

Emulation always seemed to me as a way of keeping old games alive, not to show the evil console companies PC is superior. If you do not believe in consoles thats fine, then do not play console exclusives end of story. People acting like they are entitled to Zelda on PC for free is crazy.

@troll93: I don't disagree with anything you said.

But We do not live in utopia. Despite the best intentions of the debs, who I am sure do not condone piracy at all, people are exploiting Cemu to pirate Zelda.

I agree if you own the game , what you do with it (aside from making copies to sell) is up to you.

However, they made Cemu closed source ... come on man see the forrest through the tree's either they are hiding something or intending to make a profit off of it. Both those go against the whole idea of emulators being open and free to preserve games.

@obsesivegamer said:

Emulators including commercial 49.99 $- ones have a history of having won legal battles, though by becoming a commercial product and company they open themselves up to being bought out or otherwise legally pursued, whereas open source projects cannot be shut down as easily. There is neither a legal nor a moral obligation to be free or open source, it's a choice.

Software emulation of CPUs+GPUs does not infringe on copyright or technology patent laws. Emulators can absolutely be sold for money. Similarly giving away pirated game copies for free, doesn't make it any less infringing of a companies copyright, although who knows how this affects sentencing. In my mind it's hard to imagine why a person who owns a console shouldn't be allowed to port these games to a different console or a PC or phone. There are laws from country to country (which aren't quite sensible - DMCA) that prohibit any circumvention of copy-protection, but emulators don't circumvent copy protection, ideally they just play the game as is. Sony by using CDs in the Playstation 1 opened themselves up to emulation. I guess this is the greyest of areas. As far as I understand: Currently it's the game ROM-transferring/dumping part that is illegal, but which certain people insist on doing themselves and consider it civil disobedience.

This is a bit of of a complex issue, I've searched as far as the following article before getting distracted, which also embeds an in depth documentry vid: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-ethics-of-emulation-how-creators-the-community-and-the-law-view-console-emulators/

Pretty good progress being made so far, 1080p ~30fps with 4K textures looks like this, as of Cemu version 1.7.4:

Should be pretty solid in two or three year's time!

@fattony12000: isnt that better than either console? Or is it not fully playable yet?

@oursin_360: A video posted a few days ago from someone involved in this had notes like "Link no longer falls through the ground!" and "water is now visible! you can now swim!" So I think it still has some pretty fundamental problems even though the videos look good.

@kcin: @oursin_360: Actually 1.7.4 got rid of almost every gameplay issue there was. The camera rune is still buggy I believe and there's the occasional hard crash, but it's playable from start to finish. You need a monster CPU to get buttery framerate but I'm pulling 20-30fps on a 3570k. I've played about 5hrs with 3-4 crashes and no other problems

A very sketchy thing this is. But then again I feel like this about most things making way too much money on Patreon.

Also I wonder how much of the source code is stolen from Dolphin?

Hi (I'm new) My game turns on, put after the intro movie it only shows a black screen with my health and controls. Also I can hear sounds when i move. Can anyone help? thanks.

I found a critical glitch but can't fix it.Can someone tell me how to fix that?

Here's the video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBuiC8cKhsU

....a lot of games don't allow or support this. Odd thing to complain about but people do love to complain about Nintendo. Oh and you can now do this in Zelda.

@deathfromace: More games support it than those that don't. And I don't love to complain about Nintendo...or anyone else for that matter. They just happen to do a lot of questionable shit I don't personally agree with. I would love to not have a reason to complain about them at all.

And, hey, it's great that they added that option. Unfortunately, when I made that comment, it wasn't a thing and I know this might come as a shocker to you, but I was unable to peer into the future that day.

@babychoochoo: there is a reason I said you can do it now...it was meant to inform and not argue or whatever you think I was doing but nice comeback being rude. People wanted it and it was added or at the very least they added it without people complaining. Either way it was added.

I still think complaining about this one thing is weird.

Why? The English voice acting is garbage. I'll complain about what I want.

@ivdamke: because you are complaining about something they didn't do and was not promised or talked about and not all games do. You got annoyed and angry (it seems) for something that was not in the game ...and as I said before was never expected. It reads as you just created a thing to get mad about.

Edit: English voices seem on par with everything else that has english.