How to Play the Legend of Zelda on Your PC
You’ll have to do a little legwork
The Legend of Zelda franchise currently consists of 27 video games, with the first game released on the original Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System) in 1986. The latest game, Breath of the Wild, is a key title for the Nintendo Switch platform and a sequel is in the works as we speak.
Zelda games are beloved by millions of people all over the world, but if you want to play them on a PC rather than a console, you’ll have to do a bit of legwork.
Table of Contents
How to Play the Legend of Zelda on Your PC
With the exception of a brief dalliance with the 3DO console in the 90s, all Legend of Zelda games are developed by Nintendo exclusively for their consoles. If you want to play any of their games on a PC, your only option is to emulate that console using special emulation software. To accomplish this, you usually need some or all of these:
- The correct emulation app.
- Additional files such as a copy of the console’s BIOS or plugin files for graphics and sound.
- A digital “dump” of the game data.
- A computer that meets the minimum requirements of the emulator and the title you wish to emulate.
Just because you have everything you technically need to emulate a Legend of Zelda game, that doesn’t mean you have the legal right to do it. There’s some additional homework you need to do before proceeding.
Legal Considerations
First, you must make sure that you know the legal rules around emulation wherever you live. Different countries and territories have different laws around the legality of emulation.
In some places, it’s legal to make backups of video games that you have purchased. Modifying your console to play these backups or using emulation to play them on a PC may also be legal in such places.
In other places, it’s illegal to circumvent copy-protection measures on media such as video games. So the very act of “ripping” a copy of a game can land you in hot water.
We can’t give you any legal advice; all we can say is that you should never accept blanket statements about the legality of emulation. Check what your rights are yourself, specific to your situation.
Picking the Right Emulator
There are numerous emulator choices out there. So it’s best to take a stepwise approach to find the right one:
- Choose which Legend of Zelda game you want to play and note which console it was made for.
- List the emulators for that console after finding them with a search engine..
- Check which of these emulators have the highest compatibility rating for that particular Legend of Zelda game.
We’re going to use The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as an example. There are two versions of the game. One for the Nintendo Wii U and the other for the Nintendo Switch. We’re going with the Wii U version of the game for a few reasons:
- Wii U emulation is much more mature and stable than Switch emulation.
- Dumping games from a Wii U is simpler than from a Switch.
The specific emulator we’ve chosen is Cemu, because its compatibility database lists Breath of the Wild as “Perfect.”
Finding a Playable Copy of the Game
Once you’ve found the right emulator, you need a physical or digital copy of the game.
You’ll need a physical copy of this game as well as access to a customized Wii U console to create a game dump.
In the specific case of Cemu and Breath of the Wild, you’ll need to use a WiiU console with custom firmware to dump a copy of the game from a disc (or from a digital download) to a USB drive. The process is quite involved, but Cemu has a detailed game dumping guide that shows you exactly how to do it.
If you don’t own the console in question, you can also enlist the help of a friend who does own the right equipment. You don’t always need to dump games to emulate them. Consoles that use standard CD, DVD, or BluRay discs can often work from the appropriate PC optical drive. The Wii U uses a proprietary format, so inserting its disc into a computer drive won’t work. As such, the need to dump the game using a real Wii U becomes necessary.
How to Use an Emulator
Each specific emulator works somewhat differently, but all of them generally work the same. Using Cemu as our example, the steps are as follows:
- Download and unzip Cemu.
- Run Cemu.exe
- At first startup, you’ll be asked to specify the “mlc path” where all your saves, DLC, and app updates are stored. You can choose to specify nothing, and it will default to the Cemu folder.
- Next, specify the folder where your games are stored. Cemu automatically checks this folder to scan for new games.
- The graphics packs are optional extras that can help enhance games, but we’re going to skip that here. It’s not required to play the game or get it running.
- Select next once you are happy with your settings so far.
- On this next screen, select Configure Input.
- Set Emulate Controller to Wii U Gamepad. That’s because many Wii U games require the controller to be the Wii U Gamepad.
- Under controller API, choose whichever suits you. We chose Xinput since we’re using an Xbox controller.
- Under Controller, select the controller that you want to use.
- Select A and then press the button on your controller that you want to use to emulate the A button on a Wii U gamepad.
- Repeat this for every control until you have mapped everything.
- Enter a name for this controller profile and save it. The Screen should now look like below.
- Close the window and then choose any additional options of your choice on the getting started page.
- Once you are happy with your choices, select close.
- Now, select File > Load
This is where things start to diverge. You’ll notice that Cemu is looking for one of several file types such as Wud, Wux, ISO, Wad, or Rpx files. Which of these you need to open depends on the method of game dumping used.
In this case, it’s an Rpx file. So we simply select it and then select Open. That’s it! The game is now running on a PC.
Additional Tips
You may notice the first time you run a game in Cemu that there’s a notification about “shaders” being compiled. The first time you play the game, this will happen and only needs to be done once per game.
On some lower-end computers, this might affect performance temporarily. It’s possible to download these shader caches that other users have uploaded to skip over this slight annoyance, but it shouldn’t affect gameplay.
If you want to enhance a given title, you can also download “graphics packs.” To access the community archive:
- Select Options.
- Select Graphics Packs
- Tick Installed Games to only download packs for games you have.
- Select Download latest community graphic packs.
- Expand the options for the game in question.
- Tick the box next to any modifications you’d like to try. For example, under Mods FPS++ allows for higher frame rates.
You can see the description of each option by clicking on its text. This is an example of how to play a Legend of Zelda game on PC. Have fun!
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Sydney Butler is a social scientist and technology fanatic who tries to understand how people and technology coexist. He has two decades of experience as a freelance computer technician and more than a decade as a technologies researcher and instructor. Sydney has been a professional technology writer for more than five years and covers topics such as VR, Gaming, Cyber security and Transhumanism. Read Sydney’s Full Bio
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How to Play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on PC
Last Update: November 2022
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the best game of 2017, winning the Game of the Year award. It is an exclusive title for Nintendo Wii U and Nintendo Switch, so that means you can’t enjoy it if you only have a PC… until now. We are going to tell you how to download and play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on your PC for free using Cemu Wii U Emulator. This is an emulator that will allow the game to run on Windows computers.
Realistically, we do not believe that almost no one is going to pass a title as long and complex as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in a computer emulator. But surely many users will want to try it for a while out of curiosity, and also to find out to what extent their PC can increase the resolution of the game, which in its native platforms never exceeds 1,600 x 900 pixels.
To play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a PC we must use a Nintendo Wii U emulator, as the Nintendo Switch is still pretty young and prone to bad quality emulation. It is true that the Switch has already been partially hacked, but as the emulators are created by fans that aren’t generating any profit from their work, their progress will be slow.
We will explain step by step how to emulate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in Windows, and at the end, we will take a look at the usual legal and ethical problems of emulation. If you want to know about how the game itself looks in the PC, it is very fast, and the team works in increasing its performance and correcting failures. To this day, the title is playable, albeit with a couple of massive errors, which even prevent progress when reaching certain areas. However, we can always expect improvements from Cemu, the emulator that makes the game work.
Contents
- How to Get The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Your PC
- Is It Legal To Emulate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild?
How to Get The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Your PC
1. The first thing we have to do is download Cemu, the Nintendo Wii U emulator. It only works on recent versions of Windows, and you should make sure to download the latest version from this link because it can bring many optimizations for Breath of the Wild:
Download Cemu for Windows
2. To date, it is difficult to estimate the requirements to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild fluently. Some people are testing 4K settings. Usually, the more powerful our PC is, the better. But emulation failures can pose problems even on very high-end computers. What we do know perfectly are the minimum requirements of the Cemu emulator:
- Windows 7 or higher (always 64 bits).
- 4 GB of RAM. 6 GB or more is recommended.
- Nvidia or AMD graphics card (the Intel integrated chipsets usually crash).
3. Once we run Cemu successfully from the folder in which we unzip it (it does not need to be installed), it will ask us to configure a command. If we have skipped this step, we must enter the “Options” menu and click on “Input settings”:
4. Now a window will open to configure the command. The Nintendo Wii U includes a touchscreen controller, but The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does not use the touch functions. Therefore, we can and will use any standard controller (such as the Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller) that works on our PC. On this screen we can assign the controls:
5. In “Controller 1” we must choose “Wii U GamePad” (the other options do not work) and select the controller that we have connected to the computer. Actually, it would be possible to use the keyboard, but we do not recommend it at all since the initial minutes will become impossible if we refuse to play with a gaming controller.
The configuration of the controller should not be a problem – we just have to mark each box and press the button of the command that we want to assign. In case you do not understand, here we explain the terms used by Cemu:
Main buttons and arrow pad: We will assign the 4 main buttons that the controller has on the right to the letters A / B / X / Y. and the d- to the arrow pad. That is, “d-up” would be the “up” arrow in the pad, “d-down” would be “down”, “d-left” would be “left” and “d-right” would be “right”.
Control sticks: the stick used to move the character (usually the left) is assigned to the letter l-. For example, in “l-up” you would have to move the stick up, following the same scheme as in the arrow pad. The camera (the right lever) corresponds to the r-. In each stick, when pressing towards the bottom, there is a hidden button that clicks, and they are assigned to “l-click” and “r-click”.
Triggers: the buttons on the upper side of the control are L and R (those that are higher) and ZL and ZR (the lower ones, which usually have travel).
Extra buttons: to the symbols “+” and “-” (that give us access to the menus) we must associate the two small buttons in the central area of the command, which normally have in the middle one of larger size, intended for system functions and not the games.
6. Once the configuration of the command is finished, it is only necessary to use the “File” option and choose “Load” to search for the image file of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that we have previously stored on our PC.
The game will start after a few seconds (which can be more than a few seconds depending on the power of our PC), and after that, we should be able to try it.
If you are an advanced user, take a look at these packs to modify the graphics (both to improve and lower the resolution) that give the user more control over the visual aspect.
Web: Zelda Graphic Enhancements: Breath of the Wild (GitHub)
Is It Legal To Emulate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild?
The emulation of video games has always been a controversial practice. In any case, the creators do not worry much, because it does not affect their benefits too much, at least not at the level of authentic piracy.
It is considered legal to emulate a console. Creating and downloading an emulation program is not a problem by itself. Normally, old consoles are emulated, and this is seen as beneficial sometimes, but the Nintendo Wii U is not very powerful and has been on the market for 4 years now, so The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild took only a short time to be supported.
Downloading Internet games with copyright is illegal. Despite the fact that it is weird to see Internet users being punished for it, it is still prohibited. It is easy to find The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild available for download on the Internet, and most of the time it already has the necessary patch to play on your PC.
Actually, if we own the game, we should be the ones extracting the image of the official copy that we have to our PC. However, even with the original disk at hand, this process is much more complicated than a download.
The correct and legal thing would be to try The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on our PC only if we own the original game. But we can not deny that, in fact, the emulation does not harm the video game creators as much as real piracy does, and we usually do not fight against it with determination… although the measures against piracy, much more dangerous than plain emulation, also make emulation itself difficult.
Nobody will stop buying the unexpectedly successful Nintendo Switch for playing TLOZ: Breath of the Wild on a computer. The experience is not going to be even remotely the same. The vast majority of PC players will spend a few minutes out of curiosity, but they will not complete a title of this caliber suffering the inconveniences of an emulator.
We hope that this tutorial on how to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a PC has helped you. It is worth taking a look at its emulated version but, of course, we think that anyone willing to complete the game and enjoy it in its entirety should buy a Nintendo Switch since it will be a much more pleasant and entertaining experience.
What do you think of this tutorial? Are you going to try The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild emulated on your Windows PC, or do you prefer to opt directly for the original version?
Also read:
How to Play Animal Crossing Pocket Camp on PC.
How to Run Android Apps on PC.
Download Kik Messenger for PC.
ES File Explorer for PC
The Legend of Zelda, a series of games — all The Legend of Zelda games in order, a list of the best and new — Igromania
The Legend Of Zelda
3DS, GameCube, GBA, NES, Nintendo Switch, Wii, Wii U
Adventure , RPG, Action
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
3DS, GBA, Nintendo Switch, Satellaview, SNES, Wii, Wii U
Adventure, Action, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
3DS, GB, GBC, Nintendo Switch
Adventure, RPG, Action
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
3DS, N6, GameCube , Wii, Wii U
Adventure, RPG, Action, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
GameCube, N64, Wii, Wii U
Adventure, Action, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
GameCube
Adventure, Action
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
GameCube, Wii, Wii3, Action
, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
NDS, Wii U
Adventure, Puzzle, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
NDS, Wii U
Adventure, Action, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Wii, Wii U
Adventure, Arcade
The9 Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker 9003 HD
Adventure, Action
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
3DS
Adventure, Action, Arcade
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D
3DS
Adventure, Arkada
Zelda Tri Force Heroes
3DS
Role
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Nintendo Switch, Wii U
, ROL : Definitive Edition
Nintendo Switch
Adventure, Action
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019)
Nintendo Switch
Adventure, RPG, Action
A complete list of The Legend of Zelda games in chronological order with reviews and player ratings.
Reviews and reviews, screenshots and videos, guides and tips for all major games in The Legend of Zelda series.
The best and worst games, sequels, prequels and spin-offs on
PC (PC),
PS4 (Pro),
xbox one,
android,
iOS (iPhone/iPad),
Nintendo Switch
and other popular platforms.
All about the game series The Legend of Zelda.
GUIDE. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild on PC.
Have you been looking at the new Nintendo Switch console for a long time with envy because it has The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild? Struggling with the urge to buy this console to play this exclusive? Do not understand why the developers are so cruel and do not release this great game on all platforms? Then you are at the right place. In this video, I’ll show you how to set up Cemu 1.11.3 emulator on PC in 10 minutes and run The Legend of Zelda with stable and playable FPS.
STRICTLY FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS AND THEN EVERYTHING WILL WORK NORMALLY!!!
1) First you need to download the archive from the link drive. google.com/file/d/1LdFxCEeVUGs7-6fmQXdttROva1z_wg9x/view?usp=drivesdk
it contains a text file containing a link to the torrent with the game itself with all DLC , as well as the files necessary to run and configure the emulator.
2) Required game version 1.4.1. If you already have this version of the game, you can not download this torrent and proceed to step 4.
3) There is an image in the downloaded torrent. We mount it and copy all the files from the image to our PC into a separate folder, let’s call it «Zelda». I warn you right away, transferring files can take a long time, since there are a lot of small files.
4) Getting to this point, we assume that the files from the image have already been downloaded to a separate folder on the PC. Unpack the archive «cemu_1.11.3» into the folder «Zelda» with the replacement of all files.
5) Unpack the archive «cemuhook_1113_0562» into the folder «Zelda» with the replacement of all files.
6) Unpack the archive «9439 for v1.4.0 & v1.4.1». There should be a «dcac9927.bin» file there. It needs to be moved to the address «zelda\shaderCache\transferable».
7) (You can skip it) The downloaded image in the game should already have graphics packs, but just in case, I added them to the archive. We go to the address «zelda \ graphicPacks» and check for the presence of packs, there should be 56 of them. If so, let’s move on.
8) Next, run the cemu.exe file. Our emulator opens. On the top panel we find «options \ Input settings» and configure the keyboard or gamepad. We also select the console language «options \ console language \ russian» in the settings. Next, go to «options \ GPU buffer» and check the box for Low (fast) to increase the FPS.
9) Next, set up the pack schedule. «Options \ Graphic packs» and check the boxes against those packs that we need.
9.1) We select the required screen resolution, I recommend 1920×1080, but if you wish, you can increase the resolution to 4K.
9.2) Turn on anti-aliasing — tick against FXAA.
9.3) It is also recommended to lock the game at 30FPS — check the box next to «30FPS Lock» and check the box next to «FPS ++»
9.4) To increase FPS, also put a check mark against «Regular Resolution Shadow»0109 9.5) Who has video cards from NVIDIA, select all the packs in the name of which there is «NVIDIA». Who has video cards from AMD do the appropriate actions.
9.6) You can experiment with the rest of the packs yourself.
10) Run the game: File then Load, go to the Zelda\game\…\code folder and select the U-king.rpx file. After the game starts to load and different inscriptions like «Nintendo …» begin to appear on the screen, close the emulator through the cross.
11) We go along the path «zelda \ shaderCache \ transferable \» now there should be 2 files, our «dcac9927.bin» and created by the game «488181bf.bin» (you may have a different name). Copy the name of the second file (488181bf) and delete it and give our file this name.
