Playing "The Wind Waker" on a Mac
For many a fan, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is consider a masterpiece; one of, if not the best game in the series. But despite owning a Gamecube as a teen I never actually played the game, and recently decided I needed to change that.
Sadly Nintendo has yet to release a Switch port (though just about every month rumours abound that it’s finally coming), so that wasn’t an option. I had an old Wii that I could play the game on, but it was kind of clunky, and the graphic quality wasn’t that great. But then I read a Mac Stories piece about how the new M1 Macs are great Gamecube/Wii emulators, and even allow for texture packs to upgrade the image quality to HD or even 4K and I started digging. And while there were plenty of articles on how to get things up and running on a PC, getting things working for the Mac was a bit of a trial-and-error situation.
So here’s my guide to getting The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker not only running on a Mac, but in crystal clear HD or 4K resolution.
The Guide
First you’ll need a copy of The Wind Waker. For legal reasons I’m going to tell you that downloading ROMs is a bit of a copyright grey-area so if any lawyers ask you absolutely should only play a copy you backed up from your personal copy of the game.
Next you’ll need a copy of Dolphin. Dolphin is an open source Gamecube/Wii emulator that you can download for free to play your totally legal backed-up copy of games. If you’re running an Intel Mac you can grab the latest stable version. If you’re running an M1 or M2 Mac you’ll need to grab one of the Beta or Development versions. For what it’s worth I’m currently running version 5.0-17554 on my 16” M1 MacBook Pro and it works great.
Now what about this whole HD/4K thing I mentioned? Well, in order to do that you’ll need to get what’s called a texture pack. Essentially these are fan made packs of textures that have re-drawn all the original game textures so that they can be played back in high-resolution. There’s a couple out there but the one I’m using (and have been absolutely blown away by, for what it’s worth) is Hypatia’s. The textures are free, but you can always make a donation as a way of saying thanks. Download those and extract them. We’ll come back to them shortly.
Once you’ve got Dolphin installed (as easy as dragging the application from the DMG file into your Applications folder), you’ll want to import your games. I like to create a folder in my home folder simply labelled “Games” and store everything in there. You can then launch Dolphin and drag the games into there.
Dolphin with a collection of Gamecube games
Now we need to install the custom textures. The readme in the texture pack details how to install, however the instructions are specific to Windows, but the process is essentially the same for the Mac. You’re going to want to copy the GZL folder into Dolphin’s custom texture folder. The quickest way to access it is to open a new Finder window, press SHIFT + CMD + G, and copy/paste the following path:
~/Library/Application Support/Dolphin/Load/TexturesThis will take you to the custom texture location, where you can copy over the custom HD textures.
Next from Dolphin you’ll want to open up the Graphics settings. There’s a bunch of different backend options, and it’ll likely default to Vulkan. However, I noticed this caused some serious flickering in certain elements of the game (most noticeably in the title screen). However if you switch the backend to Metal this should fix the issue. I’ve been playing with Metal as my backend so far, and had great success.
Under the Enhancement screen you have a few options you’ll want to change. The first is internal resolution: this determines at what quality the game is scaled to. I’m able to run the game at 4x (1440p) with no real noticeable hit to performance (though I am running this on a computer with an M1 Max and 32 GB of RAM), but every computer is going to be different (my friend for example had to knock it back to 720p). Experiment until you’re happy.
From the Advanced tab, you’ll want to make sure you tick “Load Custom Textures” in order to get the nice HD textures to apply. You can actually toggle this off and on during gameplay if you want to see what a difference the custom textures make.
There’s a bunch of other toggles across these tabs that you can experiment with. To be honest I don’t know what most of them do and have been running with mostly default and been very happy.
You’ll also need to setup your controller. You can use a wireless bluetooth controller like a Playstation or Xbox controller, though you’ll first have to connect it to your system and the build a custom configuration for your controller. This is what I initally did, until I then went ahead and purchased a third-party wired Nintendo Switch controller. Since setting these profiles up can be a bit finicky I’ve gone ahead and uploaded my settings for you so you can simply download them and copy them to the following path:
~/Library/Application Support/Dolphin/Config/Profiles/GCPadThe texture pack also includes some optional textures, like for re-skinning Link, or for custom buttons based on what controller you’re using. However the instructions are included with the pack I’ve found them to be in-accurate. For example, I tried installing the custom PS4 controller textures by following the instruction of “copy the "HUD" folder into the "GZL" folder and overwrite the files.”, however it turns out this actually overwrites a bunch of key files and you’ll lose a bunch of custom textures. As a result I’d honestly just avoid it, but if you really want custom button textures you might want to manually compare the folder structure and copy only what is necesary.
And that’s basically it. You should now be able to play The Wind Waker or really any other Gamecube game on your Mac. So far things have been pretty smooth, though I have enountered a few bugs or glitches here and there that I’m trying to troubleshoot (though so far nothing game-breaking). If I come across any solutions I’ll be sure to share them here.
Now, I’m by no means an expert at any of this, so if you run into any issues yourself I can try and help troubleshoot but your best bet is probably the official Dolphin Support Forums.
In the meantime, enjoy sailing the seven seas and… waking… the wind? And here’s hoping Nintendo hurry’s up and releases that Switch port so we don’t have to bother with all this nonsense…
Update - Dec. 1, 2022: Turns out the bugs I was experiencing related to the game slowing down was entirely due my audio configuration. I had DSP LLE enabled so I could get Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound, and this was causing my problems. Turning that off seems to have removed the issue.