- Nintendo’s newly released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake for Switch 2 is already booting and running on Android via the BananaNative translation layer.
- Testers managed to achieve 25-30fps on a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone (POCO F7 Ultra) using custom GPU drivers and frame generation.
- The build demands more than 12GB of RAM during heavy transitions, leading to immediate crashes on phones with less than 16GB of RAM.
The emulation scene has been moving very fast lately, but some recent breakthroughs border on ridiculous. Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake a few days ago for the Switch 2, and developers have already gotten it booting and running on Android, building on the rapid rise of Nintendo Switch 2 emulators and ports on Android. While we have previously seen projects bring classic Zelda titles like Majora’s Mask and the original Ocarina of Time to Android via native recompilation, having a brand-new, current-gen console remake running on mobile devices within days of release is rather unprecedented.
As shown across community threads on Reddit, early builds of the game are running on high-end Android phones through BananaNative, a native translation-layer tool. Reddit user BottleCautious3346 demonstrated the game running on a POCO F7 Ultra powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, achieving playable framerates hovering around 25fps to 30fps after enabling frame generation and swapping to custom GPU drivers, as you can see in the footage below: