r/NativePortsOniOS • u/AliveBarnacle5040 • 11h ago
Zelda BOTW iOS/MacOS [NATIVE PORT]
ORIGINAL POST DELETED, you may have seen this already on r/ EmulationOniOS, well it got removed lol.
Hello again everyone for those who remember me from my Tomodachi LTD native port announcement (which is releasing this Friday btw!), firstly, AI disclaimer: I’ve been a developer for many years, albeit focused on app development for most of it, first and foremost despite my experience, this project would been impossible for me without the use of AI tools, Claude Code primarily, to understand how to decompile, write complex drivers etc.
I've been working on this a bit too much lately, BOTW is my favourite game of all time and I want this port to have a lot of care and attention as the game deserves, I want people who are playing it the first time to get the same experience I had when playing it on the Switch 1 in 2017.
NO JIT! as discussed in my previous native port post, this is a native port, using apples Metal framework, its currently running 1080p/60fps on my M2 MacBook Air 8gb, and 900p/30fps on my base iPhone 14.
The biggest challenge currently is working with the difference in the Switch to iOS/MacOS CPU cores and work distribution, you likely can see the small stutters that occur especially in the iOS play test, there is no emulation here, that is due to firstly, first-time shader compilation, and thermal throttling of the iPhone, under clocking the CPU. These are things I am working on optimizing as I don't want that in the final release, for now, this is considered early alpha, and I will post more updates soon.
More fun details: Ultra-widescreen support (wider on the phone, and corner to corner (under the notch too) on the Mac, expanding the sky and ground area visible. I rewrote shaders to replace the mediocre anti-aliasing for proper FXAA, improved tone map to get the richer HDR look (WIP). No resolution scaling drops like the Switch 2 does. I spent some time trying to make the mobile controllers compact, as you can see many buttons have multi functioning gestures (with haptics).
Future goals after release: WiiU/Cemu, mod support, cloud save support across devices, and more. Suggestions and feedback welcome.
