Gamingzeldatears-of-the-kingdomstatic-recompilationpc-portnintendo-switch
UltraTears is an unofficial native Windows port of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, built on your PC from your own Switch dump
UltraTears translates Tears of the Kingdom's Switch code ahead of time into a Windows program instead of emulating it, and the developer has it playing through Great Sky Island at the game's own 30 fps.
A Switch emulator pretends to be a Switch, translating the game’s ARM code for your PC’s processor on the fly, while you play.
UltraTears does the translating once, up front. In the developer’s words, “the game’s program code is translated ahead of time (static recompilation, ARM64 → C → x86-64), and the Switch system and its NVN graphics API are replaced by the port’s own implementations on Windows and Vulkan.” Shaders and textures get converted for PC graphics cards during the build, “not while you play.”
It’s the difference between hiring an interpreter to sit next to you for the whole vacation and getting the menu translated before you leave.
The repo is careful about what it doesn’t contain: “no game code, no game assets, no Nintendo SDK code, no firmware and no keys.” It “decrypts nothing and reads no keys,” so encrypted .nsp, .xci and .nca files won’t work. You hand it the ExeFS and RomFS folders you already extracted from version 1.4.3 of your own copy, and the build happens on your machine. Everything it makes from the game “must stay there: do not share it.”
The build is a chore. By the README’s estimates on eight cores, packing about 304,000 game files takes around 4 minutes, translating the code 2, compiling it into UltraTears.exe 15, shaders 5 and textures 7, so call it half an hour before you see a title screen. You’ll want about 32 GB free for the output plus 16 GB for the dump.
The first release, v0.1.0-beta, went up on October 25, the same day the repo was created, and it passed 400 GitHub stars within days. The requirements aren’t exotic: Windows 10 or 11 on an AVX2 processor, a Vulkan 1.3 driver with VK_EXT_shader_object, and 16 GB of RAM. Xbox, DualSense and Switch Pro controllers work through SDL3, though the face buttons follow Switch layout, so A is on the right.
Steam Deck owners have to wait. “The Windows build does not work through Proton because its memory access method is incompatible with winevulkan,” and a native Linux and Deck version is “planned and is a high priority.”
UltraTears runs one specific version of one game on one tested graphics card today. How far does it get once other people’s PCs, and Nintendo’s lawyers, have had a look?