The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
1 recomp and 2 ports
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (zelda3)
snesrev/zelda3
zelda3: a reverse-engineered reimplementation of A Link to the Past in C, around 70,000 to 80,000 lines, that reimplements every part of the original game and is playable from start to end. On first use it extracts the resources (levels and images) from your ROM; after that the ROM is no longer needed. It uses LakeSnes’s PPU and DSP, with many speed optimizations, and it can run the original machine code side by side and compare RAM every frame to verify that the C is correct. It adds basic widescreen, shaders, 240 vertical lines, a high-resolution Mode 7 map, MSU-1 audio, item switching, and over 30 fixes to the original’s bugs, plus snapshots that keep the input history so playthroughs can be replayed. For now you build it yourself. One of its last 100 commits lists Claude as a co-author.
You needYour own US The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past ROM (zelda3.sfc). To build it on Windows, Python, TCC, and SDL2; there are instructions for other systems.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (mstan)
mstan/ZeldaAlttPSNESRecomp
A static recompilation of A Link to the Past (US version) with snesrecomp: the 65816 code is translated to C, and the rest of the console (video, audio, DMA) runs on an embedded emulation core derived from snes9x. It has been hand-verified up to the first dungeon, including sword combat and audio; later content (Hyrule Castle past the prologue, the Sanctuary, the Dark World) hasn’t been hand-verified, though an assisted survey for 0.6.5 entered fourteen dungeons and thirteen boss rooms, without certifying every boss defeat or the ending. As launcher mods it has adaptive widescreen, up to 446 logical pixels wide with the HUD anchored to the edges, and MSU-1 music if you supply a music pack, using qwertymodo’s patch, which is built in at compile time. It has save states, turbo, and SDL controllers. The latest release, 0.6.5 (October 18), is Windows-only; the latest Linux build is 0.6.1. 53 of its last 100 commits list Claude as a co-author.
You needYour own US The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past ROM (SNES, CRC32 777AAC2F, 1 MiB); it works with or without a 512-byte copier header. 64-bit Windows, or Linux with version 0.6.1.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (xander-haj)
xander-haj/Z3R
Z3R is a fork of zelda3, snesrev’s C reimplementation of A Link to the Past, adding widescreen, HUD changes, settings, and an early randomizer. The source builds a native executable and a runtime asset file, zelda3_assets.dat, that is generated from your ROM. For now the randomizer only shuffles the items in dungeon chests. It has its own launcher (Z3R Launcher) and a wiki. The latest release, 0.2.4 (June 16), ships packages for Windows, Linux (AppImage and Flatpak), and macOS.
You needYour own clean The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (USA) ROM, as zelda3.sfc or zelda3.smc in the project root, to extract the assets. Building from source also needs Git, Python 3 with Pillow and PyYAML, SDL2, and a C compiler (MSBuild or TCC on Windows).
Installs with
Quiver Launcher · Zelda 3 Launcher · Relic of the Past · Z3R Launcher · ReComp Launcher
Questions
Can you play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past natively on PC?
Yes. The catalog has 1 recomp and 2 ports, and one of them is fully playable.
What do I need to play it?
Your own copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES / Super Famicom). Recompendium only links projects that don’t distribute the game, and each entry says which version or region you need.
Which one is the most popular?
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (zelda3), with 4,956 stars on GitHub.