Wind Waker HD Recompiled — Android Enhanced

Wind Waker HD Recompiled — Android Enhanced

Better touch controls, graphics and performance for the Android port of ZeldaWWHDRecomp: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD (Wii U, USA) as a native app for 64-bit ARM phones and tablets, recompiled from the game's PowerPC code to ARM, with its graphics running directly on Vulkan. No emulator.

This is a fork of GreenNaugahyde/ZeldaWWHDRecompAndroid. Everything that port does still applies: you bring your own game dump, the app extracts it and compiles the game code on your device on the first start. Its full README (getting started, controllers, frame generation, building) is in docs/android-port-readme.md.

The app contains no game files, no game code and no keys. You need your own Wii U disc image (.wud/.wux) with its keys.

What this fork adds

Touch controls made for a phone

• Floating left stick: it appears where your thumb lands on the left side and stays there until you lift it.
• Camera by swiping on the right side of the screen, with an adjustable speed; double tap to center it behind Link.
• Context buttons that follow your game: the app reads your save data, so
  • B shows the sword (or nothing until you have one), ZR the shield (or crouch);
  • X / Y / R show the item you assigned, with the game's own item artwork;
  • the combat buttons (jump attack, spin attack, vertical slash, dodge / backflip) appear once you have a sword;
  • the D-pad buttons (Wind Waker, cannon, salvage hook) appear once you have those items.
• One-touch combat moves: each button performs the GamePad combination for you.
• Layout editor (✎ next to the menu button): move and resize every control on a grid, remove the ones you don't want and put them back from a panel.
• Gyro aiming with the phone's sensors (and a recalibrate button), rumble as the phone's vibration, and vibration on touch.
• Icons in the art style of the game. Item, equipment and HUD icons are built on your device from your own game files the first time it starts; nothing of the game is shipped.

Graphics

• Native widescreen: the game renders at your screen's shape (21:9, 20:9...) instead of stretching 16:9. The camera sees more to the sides with the same vertical view (Hor+), the culling follows, and the HUD keeps its proportions with hearts, rupees and buttons at the new screen edges (Options → Widescreen, switchable while playing). Ported from the official project's aspect-ratio support.
• Shadows fixed: no more flickering between the near (detailed) and far (basic) shading when moving the camera, and no more grid / moire pattern on sand and other ground. The causes were dynamic depth bias left over from the previous render pass and work submitted in chunks in the middle of a frame.
• Renderer fixes ported from the official Vulkan backend: invariant vertex positions for multipass depth tests, depth-compare samplers bound to depth surfaces, GX2CopySurface of depth and array slices, uniform blocks compared instead of trusted to write tracking.
• From the original project's v0.5: sun corona and lens flare (the game's depth peeks read the GPU depth buffer), distance haze and bloom with a proper mip chain (also removes black lines in shadows), and the Japanese version (address map tools/recomp/release_jpn.txt).
• Ambient occlusion modes, including Off.

Camera

• Pinch to zoom on the camera side: spread two fingers to bring the camera closer, pinch to move it further away (half to twice the game's distance). Zoomed out, the camera uses the game's own collision check and stays in front of walls. Not applied in first person.

Performance

The renderer's CPU work per frame was cut to a fraction in busy scenes, measured with simpleperf on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2:

• a fast path for repeated draws (grass, trees, crowds: thousands per frame), which reuses everything resolved while only uniforms or vertex data change;
• identical vertex and uniform copies reused within a submission (often 20+ MB per frame);
• redundant Vulkan state skipped, cheaper shader and texture lookups, context switches that copy only the registers in use, descriptor sets reused between draws;
• ADPF performance hints and a choice of CPU cores (automatic, performance cores, or the prime core for the game or the renderer);
• the guest vsync clock locked to the display, the screen asked for 60 Hz instead of 120, a pre-rotated swapchain, and a scheduler tick that sleeps when idle;
• from the original project: the Miiverse thread that spun a whole core is throttled, the pipeline queue is checked in slices, and compile waits wake on completion;
• the game code compiled at -O3.

More

• 60 fps by frame interpolation (game logic stays at 30 steps a second, nothing speeds up), holding full speed anywhere between 30 and 60 fps, 40 fps on 120 Hz screens (a frame every 3 refreshes, evenly paced, for phones that can't hold 60), an adaptive mode that falls back to 30 where the device can't hold 60, and the original project's redesigned True 60 (experimental).
• Game language selector: English, Spanish, French (the USA disc's languages).
• Cheats from the original project: items, sword and shield, hearts, songs, Triforce, dungeon items, infinite health / magic / ammo.
• A GameCube to HD save converter (tools/savegame/, run on a PC).
• Performance overlay with a pacing diagnostic in the log (which frames missed their vsync, and whether the game, the renderer or the GPU was late).

Recommended settings

On a recent phone: Frame rate 60 fps (or adaptive), rendering resolution 1×, CPU cores Automatic or Prime core (game), GX2DrawDone Wait. The options marked Experimental are for testing.

Most of the game holds 60 fps on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Very busy views (the title screen flight over the island, big islands seen from afar) can still drop, and a hot phone lowers its clocks.

Getting started

1. Put your disc image (.wux or .wud), its disc key (.key, same name as the image) and the Wii U common key (common.key) in one folder on your device.
2. Install the APK from the Releases page and start it. Choose Extract from your disc image… and select that folder.
3. The app extracts the game and compiles its code for your device (about 5 minutes, once).

Requirements: Android 11 or newer, 64-bit ARM, Vulkan 1.1, about 2 GB of free storage and memory.

Building

As in the Android port: Android SDK 36, NDK 27.2.12479018, JDK 17, CMake, Ninja, Python 3, and LLVM built once for Android (tools/android/build-llvm.sh), then

cd android
./gradlew assembleRelease -PwwhdDeviceRecomp -PwwhdVersionCode=<n> -PwwhdVersionName=<name>

Sign release APKs with your own key (android/keystore.properties, never committed).

Legal notice

This is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo. "The Legend of Zelda", "The Wind Waker", "Wii U" and related names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to describe what this software is compatible with.

This repository and the APK contain no game code, no game assets and no keys. The icons in android/app/src/main/res/drawable-nodpi are original artwork in the style of the game; the game's own artwork is read from your copy on your device and never leaves it. You need your own, legally obtained copy of the game, dumped from your own Wii U disc and console. Everything game-specific created on your device must not be redistributed.

License

Mozilla Public License 2.0 (see LICENSE), as the projects it is based on. Third-party code keeps its own license (see the Android port's README).

Credits

• ZeldaWWHDRecomp: the recompilation, the Wii U system libraries, the 60 fps modes, the cheats, rumble, the aspect-ratio support and the renderer and performance fixes ported here.
• GreenNaugahyde/ZeldaWWHDRecompAndroid: the Android port (Vulkan renderer, on-device compilation, options menu, frame generation).
• Cemu: the GPU address library and shader decompiler (MPL-2.0).
• The zeldaret/tww decompilation, for the save data and actor layouts.