So, I’m at home, off from work with not much to do due to recent surgery. Recovering with bedrest.

Lo and behold, Nintendo releases a remastered Ocarina of Time for Switch 2, the day I get discharged.

Except I don’t have a Switch 2. I’ve essentially committed to not buying one, primarily because I’m sick of console gaming and all the shenanigans.

Fortunately there have been a number of efforts to get this game playable on other platforms.

Thus begins my trip down memory lane.

The year is 1999 and I’m a pimply fat kid of 14. Quake 2 is my shit, and I got a Voodoo2 last Christmas.

Ocarina of Time is out and all the kids with N64s are talking about it. I, of course, lived in a PlayStation house, and I had plenty of stuff to play thanks to being an early-adopter of CD-R, modchips, and living within walking distance of a Blockbuster.

But I really wanted to play OOT.

I’d been exposed to emulators before. I’d played around with them for 2nd and 3rd Gen consoles…but a contemporary console???

And then entered UltraHLE. An emulator promising to give playable framerates emulating a contemporary console, the N64.

I had to try it.

And my man this became my purpose for living. Tweaking the emulator. Checking IRC rooms and Usenet for the latest updates or patches when I got home from school. Watching the development of it unfold in near-real-time.

Eventually it got a playable framerates on my system…if I overclocked the CPU a little bit.

It looked so cool but now it was tough to control because it was designed for the fairly unique N64 gamepad, and I only had a sidewinder.

A few Infoseek searches later and I found a schematic for building an N64 Gamepad to Paralell adapter. The circuit looked simple enough, and I put together similar circuits before…so off to Funcoland and RadioShack for the pieces I couldn’t pull out of dad’s parts bin.

And I built that damn adapter. And I played Ocarina of Time, and I was happy.

By the end, I don’t think I even made it out of Kokiri Village before I lost interest in the game, itself. Not until ~20 years later when it was re-released for 3DS.

Now it’s 2026. I just used my kids birthday as an excuse bought myself a GeForce 5060 and gave my 1660 Super to my eldest as part of his Gaming PC birthday gift. I’ve got time, and I’ve got tech.

Nearly 3 decades later. Posting this as I wait for Hookshot to patch…again. I can’t sit at my desk for long times because of the surgery…so I set up Apollo on my computer, and hooked up my laptop to the TV as a client.

And wouldn’t you know, I had issues with my gamepad…though this was much simpler since it was due to Moonlight mapping my gamepad to /dev/input/js1 and the game expects js0 (hint: SDL_JOYSTICK_DEVICE)

And because the laptop is on wireless, I have been tuning my APs around the house to get it exclusive access to a 5GHz channel until I can convince my wife that I should dangle a cat6 out our window to the router downstairs. I’m certainly in no shape to run it in the walls.

And wouldn’t you know, that after three days of fucking with this…I’m finally about to leave Kokiri Village.

And I think I’m still having more fun tracking it and setting it up, than I am playing the game.

And that says a lot. OoT holds a special place in a lot of peoples hearts for a lot of different reasons. It is a damn good game, at its core.

Here is just another reason why it holds its spot in mine.

It was…uniquely…formative in my youth. It made me into a maker. It sparked new interests and got me exposed to new online communities (which was a new thing in-and-of itself), and taught me a lot about research and development.

Looking back on it now, as an adult, and essentially travelling back to when I was a kid, and how much a game about travelling back-and-forth in your lifetime and seeing the changes play out. It just strikes me as so incredibly poetic in a way that Miyamoto himself probably never even considered.

Update: I’ve met the owl. And then I realized that I can make a wireless bridge with a spare router in my office, and then I can do full AX on the dedicated channel and keep my laptop closed (antenna is in bezel).

But the router is in the bottom shelf and I cannot bend or lift more than 10lbs. Doctors orders.

I did find a long cat6 cable though…and was able to dangle that back downstairs to the nearest AP.

By the time I did that, my gamepad powered off and I had to restart the game to get it to reconnect. And wouldn’t you know, there’s another patch for Hookshot, and among other things they are re-default-on-ing a variable or two I meant to tune anyway.

Not upset or frustrated. It’s just literally all part of the experience. I couldn’t be happier. That may also be the opiates and weed…but it’s all a part. Time is a flat circle.