Majora’s Mask can now natively run on Android

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and its direct sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, are two of the most iconic video games in history. Nintendo re-released both games on all of its home consoles released after the Nintendo 64, leaving many fans and newcomers alike wondering: What is the best way to play them today? Many would argue that the unofficial ports released by team Harbour Masters are the best way to play both games, but they don’t offer an Android release. Fortunately, one developer took it upon themselves to port the games to Android, letting you play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask natively on your Android device.

How was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask ported to Android?

If you’re wondering how this is even possible, let me try to explain. Back in 2020, a group of developers banded together to form the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team (ZeldaRET). Their stated goal was to “recreate a source code base” for select The Legend of Zelda titles (plus the original Animal Crossing) from scratch, “using information inside the game along with static and/or dynamic analysis.”

Basically, the team takes the binary extracted from a game’s original cartridge and tries to write code that compiles to the same binaries. This whole process, called decompilation, requires an incredible amount of effort and reverse engineering skills, but the team managed to fully complete their work on decompiling Ocarina of Time in late 2021 and is nearing completion on Majora’s Mask.

Although the ZeldaRET provides instructions on how to compile a working Ocarina of Time ROM using their recreated source code and assets extracted from a copy of the original game that has to be supplied by the user, they don’t provide any tools or guides on how to actually run the game on any platforms. That’s because their focus is on decompiling the games rather than producing a functional port.

Fortunately, that’s where the Ship of Harkinian project comes in. Ship of Harkinian is developed by team Harbour Masters, and it’s basically a port of Ocarina of Time that runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Switch, and Wii U. It uses the recreated source code written by the ZeldaRET to run Ocarina of Time natively on these platforms. The user still needs to supply their own copy of the original game so the Ship of Harkinian can extract the game’s assets; this is because the game’s assets are owned by Nintendo and thus can’t be legally distributed without their permission.

So, to run Ocarina of Time natively on any of the aforementioned platforms, you need to download the right Ship of Harkinian release and feed it a working copy of the game that you legally obtained.

Ship of Harkinian was initially released in March of 2022, a few months after Ocarina of Time was fully decompiled. Although the Majora’s Mask has yet to be fully decompiled (it currently sits at 94.8% completion), the effort is far along enough for a functional port to be built.

In fact, earlier this week, the Harbour Master team released the first version of such a port for Windows and Linux, named 2 Ship 2 Harkinian. It has many of the same features as Ship of Harkinian while also adding a couple of Majora’s Mask-specific changes.

If you’re interested, this article by The Verge explains the history behind the Ship of Harkinian project in more depth.

As you may have noticed, Android isn’t listed as one of the platforms that either Ship of Harkinian or 2 Ship 2 Harkinian support. Since both Ship of Harkinian and 2 Ship 2 Harkinian are open source, though, any developer can take a stab at making an Android port, and that’s exactly what GitHub developer Waterdish has done. The developer created a functioning Android port of Ship of Harkinian late last year and this week released an Android port of 2 Ship 2 Harkinian.

I set up and ran both ports on my OnePlus Open, but your mileage may vary with device compatibility. The developer expects that most Android devices running Android 4.3 and later should work, as long as they support OpenGL ES 3.0+. Since touch controls aren’t supported outside of accessing the enhancements menu, you’ll need to connect your device to a wired or Bluetooth gaming controller.

In case you’re wondering why many recommend playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask through Ship of Harkinian/2 Ship 2 Harkinian, it’s because they offer many benefits over emulation or even Nintendo’s re-releases (which often use emulation themselves).

First, the Switch’s emulated N64 releases (at least Ocarina of Time) have been documented to have rendering issues (like fog missing from certain rooms) as well as input lag.

Secondly, even though many Nintendo 64 emulators offer a ton of different features, they tend to not emulate every game 100% perfectly (as seen with even Nintendo’s official emulators). Plus, if you try to apply some enhancements like enabling widescreen support or uncapping the frame rate, certain things might break or look funky.

None of these issues apply to Ship of Harkinian or 2 Ship 2 Harkinian. You can upscale the game and enable widescreen support without any graphical issues (the original games ran at 320×240 resolution). You can uncap the frame rate to 60fps (the original games ran at 20fps). You have access to a free camera and other better camera controls.

You can play around with a lot of mods, cheats, various quality-of-life improvements, and even a built-in randomizer if you’re daring. Plus, since the games are running natively instead of via emulation, all of these enhancements can be run without issue, even on many cheap phones.

If you’re interested in playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on your Android device, then I highly recommend giving these native ports a try.

The developer of these Android ports, Waterdish, has also ported The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past to Android, based on the work by the Snesrev team. The instructions on how to get these ports up and running — sans the method to obtain the game ROMs — can be found in the following links.

I’m aware that there are remakes of both Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 3DS and that you can emulate these using a 3DS emulator. Your mileage may vary about how well these run on your device at higher resolutions, but regardless, I still think these ports of the original releases provide the best way to experience the games.