Wind Waker (GameCube) for PlayStation 5

A PS5 homebrew port of SwitchWaker, the native port of the 2002 GameCube game (USA disc GZLE01, revision 0) compiled from its decompilation and drawn with Aurora. It is laid out like PS5_Dusklight and uses the same console layer: Aurora on Dawn's WebGPU on RADV, from the PS5 Vulkan stack.

The build reads no disc and holds no game data: SwitchWaker's runtime-assets mode compiles against stub headers and fills them from the player's own disc image when the title starts.

Status

Runs on the console. First run on 2026-10-12 on a PS5 at 3840x2160: the title screen, name entry, the prologue and Outset, at 60 images a second (frame interpolation; the game's logic stays at 30), with the DualSense's symbols on the HUD. Played for minutes, not hours: nothing past Outset has been seen on the console.

No release yet. A release will be the title's folder with no game in it: the player copies their own GZLE01 disc image (.iso, .gcm or .ciso) into /data/homebrew/PPSA99309/ beside eboot.bin, and the title finds it (the first one in its folder, then on a USB drive).

Area	State
Disc	Found in the title's folder; a .iso was used on the console, .ciso only on the Mac build. A missing or wrong disc exits with a line in klog and no message on screen
Picture	16:9. The output is 3840x2160 unless the options menu's "Output resolution" says 2560x1440 or 1920x1080 (applied at the next start); the console scales it to the television. "Internal resolution" follows it ("Window size") or is fixed, which dynamic resolution needs
60 fps	Held at 3840x2160 in the scenes above, by the frame counter on screen. Not measured over a long session
Shaders	A first start with no cache compiled 3,056 render pipelines in about 12 minutes. The title now ships the caches a console produced (ps5/shader-cache) and copies them into place when the console has none: the same start then compiles nothing. They must be taken from a console again after a change to Dawn, the driver or the shaders
Button prompts	The HUD shows Cross, Circle, Square, Triangle, R1 for Z, R2 for R and a right stick for the C stick (ps5/art/make-glyphs.py, Kenney's CC0 Input Prompts). Not done: the button pictures inside message text (they are in the game's font), and the options menu's own hints, which still name the GameCube's buttons
Options menu	The touch pad's click opens it
Saves, settings	/data/homebrew/PPSA99309/user/; the first start asks to create a save file, as the game does on an empty memory card
HD textures	SwitchWaker's replacement of textures from a Dolphin pack the player supplies (user/hd_textures, off by default) is built in; not yet seen working on the console
Sound	Not checked by ear in this log
DevLoop	devloop-shot and devloop-quit in the title's folder (registered as windwaker-gc); the shot answers once the game's loop runs
Art	The icon and background are the port's own, cel-shaded, made with an image generator (ps5/art/)

Controls: left stick to move, right stick for the camera (the C stick), Cross A, Circle B, Square X, Triangle Y, R1 Z, L2 L, R2 R, Options START. The mapping is by name, as PS5_Dusklight's, which on the HUD puts Square to the right of Cross and Circle to its lower left, not where they sit on the pad.

To try a change without the console:

cmake -S vendor/switchwaker/native -B build/native-mac -G Ninja \
    -DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_AURORA=$PWD/.deps/aurora -DCOS_AURORA_PREPATCHED=ON \
    -DCOS_RECOMPCORE_DIR=$PWD/.deps/recompcore \
    -DCOS_RUNTIME_ASSETS=ON -DCOS_ASSETS_DIR=$PWD/.deps/assets/GZLE01
ninja -C build/native-mac switchwaker
COS_BUILD_DIR=$PWD/build/native-mac COS_DISC=/path/to/GZLE01.iso COS_FPS60=1 \
    COS_BUTTON_GLYPHS=$PWD/ps5/art/glyphs vendor/switchwaker/native/tools/run.sh run \
    --preset sailing --aspect 16:9 --frames 700 --shot 690

COS_TEXTURE_DUMPS=1 writes every texture drawn into the cache folder's texture_dumps, named as a replacement for it must be named.

Build

As PS5_Dusklight: on Linux (on a Mac, in the Lima VM) with PS5_Vulkan, PS5_Mesa and PS5_PayloadSDK beside this folder.

ps5/tools/vm.sh build     # from macOS; ps5/tools/build.sh inside the VM
ps5/tools/vm.sh deploy
ps5/tools/vm.sh run

build.sh runs setup-source.sh first, which patches vendor/switchwaker (ps5/patches/switchwaker.patch, every hunk behind __PROSPERO__) and fetches into .deps/ Aurora at SwitchWaker's pin with its patches, Dolphin's DSP HLE sources and the stub asset headers. While changing vendor/switchwaker, run git -C vendor/switchwaker diff > ps5/patches/switchwaker.patch before a build.

Licence

GPL-3.0 for the repository as a whole and for a built title: see LICENSING.md. No game data is stored here or built in.