kuraeow/ultratears

What it is

UltraTears is an unofficial native port of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 1.4.3 for Windows, Linux and the Steam Deck. It is not an emulator: the game's code is translated to native code ahead of time, and shaders and textures are prepared during the build rather than at runtime (project overview).

It ships no game content. You must own a copy of the game with update 1.4.3 and dump it from your own console as exefs and romfs folders. The project provides no game files, keys, firmware or dumping tools and performs no decryption.

Quick start (Windows)

Requirements: Windows 10/11 or Linux (kernel 6.7+, glibc 2.34+; SteamOS 3 meets both), a Vulkan 1.3 driver, 16 GB RAM, 4 GB VRAM and about 40 GB free space, plus a dump laid out as:

dump\
├── exefs\   main, subsdk0, sdk, main.npdm, ...
└── romfs\   about 304,000 files, 16 GB

1. Download the Windows zip from Releases and extract it to its own folder.
2. Run UltraTears Launcher.exe; if SmartScreen warns, choose More info → Run anyway.
3. Point the launcher at the folder containing exefs and romfs, then click Prepare the game. The build takes roughly 30 minutes.
4. Click Play.

On Linux and the Steam Deck, use UltraTears.AppImage, enable Allow executing file as program, prepare the game, then add the AppImage to Steam as a non-Steam game; adding --play to launch options skips the launcher (installation steps). To play on a Deck, choose For Linux (Steam Deck) or Both platforms during preparation to get a transferable game folder.

Language and font caveat

Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean rely on the Switch's system fonts, which are not part of the game or its dump. Before preparation, or later into data\fonts\, place the console's six *.bfttf files under sysdata\fonts\; without them the game stops when started in those languages.

Mods and controls

Mods made for Switch emulators work as-is: unpack each into its own folder under the launcher's mods folder so its romfs, exefs or cheats directory sits directly inside, and enable or reorder them on the Mods tab; RomFS mods and data cheats need no rebuild, code patches and Atmosphere cheats are applied when you press Play. Keyboard, mouse and controller bindings, dead zones and gyro are configured on the Controls tab, and Scene scale, FSR 1/3.1 upscaling and FXAA/SMAA options are on the General tab.

Building from source

With Git and Python 3 installed:

git clone https://github.com/kuraeow/ultratears.git
cd ultratears
python tools/setup.py --dump D:\path\to\dump

The setup downloads missing tools and produces a complete game folder in build\, including the launcher. Without --dump it reads dump\ inside the repository. See BUILDING.md for Linux and implementation details, and CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution guidance.

Constraints and licensing

The project is GPL-3.0, but the name, emblem, icon and cover are excluded from that license per the branding notes. The source contains only the addresses, hashes and short instruction replacements needed to run the game; no Nintendo SDK code or game assets are included. Everything produced from your dump is for your own use and should not be shared. Report problems with the ultratears.log from the game folder via Issues.

HotRepo's take

No GitHub daily-rank record or trend snapshot is available for this repository, so the star count alone is the only signal here. The technical claim that matters is the static-recompilation approach combined with a requirement that users supply their own dump; the repo's credibility therefore rests on the source tree and build pipeline described in BUILDING.md rather than on any bundled binary. Because the main deliverables are prebuilt launcher binaries, readers should verify the binary-to-source correspondence and release provenance before running them.