As Nintendo prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, the community has taken it into their own hands with yet another new fan development that has disappeared from the public eye for almost 3 years now (well… kind of). It’s the PC port for The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX! Now in its v1.7.2 state, thanks to GitHub user BigheadSMZ, the port is feature complete, relatively bug-free, and can already be used on PC, Linux, and Android! One caveat, though: You need a PC to compile it.
Didn’t The Port Release Already?
The Links Awakening DX Port story starts in 2023 when an anonymous user posted a fully operational version of Link’s Awakening Port on itch.io, which received massive attention online. As such, Nintendo caught on and made a copyright claim to the original source, closing the project. However, since the entire source code for the project was available online, independent developers have been forking it and building off of the original to create dedicated Android versions, bug fixes, and more.
BigheadSMZ took all of these forks and consolidated them to a single patch for the 1.0.0 version and created an executable that will spit out a usable Windows, Android, or Linux version of the game. This is a big oversimplification, and if you want a more complete explanation, see the GitHub page for more details. Notably, this new version comes with 0 copywritten assets.
Features!
This is a port of a Game Boy Color game, so the features are expectedly limited and not too far off the original 1.0 release. The game displays at any resolution, aspect ratio, and frame rate your device supports and has a near-seamless, instant loading design. Input lag? Zero.
This is by far the best unofficial way to Link’s Awakening, and I hope it can achieve a more user-friendly setup in the future, akin to Ship of Harkinian.
