The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Nintendo's thematic action-adventure sequel to Ocarina of Time takes the series back to its more cartoonish roots. Utilizing a completely new look with cel-shaded graphics, the game casts players in the role of a familiar young boy, who sets out to save his kidnapped sister. Gameplay is vintage Zelda, only that the game's overworld is covered by water. Players have to control the direction of the wind to sail across the ocean and find dungeons, towns, and plenty of secrets. A special Game Boy Advance link-up option lets another player join the quest and give hints and assistance via the handheld.

Fire and Heat Effects
In Wind Waker, the various fire and heat effects are glitched, resulting in an odd doubling of portions of the screen exposed to the effect. These fire effects are used in many places, like Dragon Roost Cavern and hanging torches. Dolphin currently does not have a proper solution for this problem. There are workarounds, but all have compromises.


 * The glitches can be fixed by enabling free look and zooming in the camera significantly until the heat effects are behind the camera. This is performed by enabling freelook in the Graphics>Advanced menu, then holding Shift-W to zoom in past the effect. This will effectively fix the heat distortions, and breaks fewer effects in the game then disabling EFB outright; however it can cause other problems such as flickering, and can take some trial and error to position the camera at the ideal spot. Use Shift-R to restore the camera to normal.


 * Checking "EFB Copies - Disable" before running the game will disable the heat effect entirely, and prevent the problem from occuring. Remember to disable it before running the game, otherwise the visuals will become stuck. Disabling EFB Copies also disables several other effects used throughout the game, such as the distance blur and the telescope, but provides a simple way to fix the problem.


 * Setting Action Replay code 003F6B2A 00000000 switches off the fullscreen heat effect in the Dragon Roost areas. (Be sure in the general config page to enable cheats, otherwise this won't work)

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Sound
With DSP HLE, sound and music may cut out at various points. This can be fixed with the DSP LLE plug-in.

Distant Areas
Windwaker uses a DOF blurring effect, which scales poorly on resolutions above the GameCube's native 640x528. The most basic option is to set Internal Resolution to "Auto (Multiple of 640x528)" and have "EFB Copies - Virtual" on. The DOF Blur is present, but scaled up to the higher resolution. This is good enough for most. However, there are several options to reduce it further.
 * Use an Internal Resolution that is higher than the window/fullscreen resolution. This means for lower resolutions use Internal Resolution of 2x Native, and higher resolutions will need 3x or 4x Native.  This will remove/reduce the DOF blur without breaking anything.
 * EFB Copies - Virtual is required for this to work on the latest revisions.
 * Super Sample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA), combined with an Internal Resolution equal to or greater then the current resolution, will reduce the blur more than any other option available. It will allow for crystal clear distance areas without breaking any effects. Unfortunately, SSAA is very GPU intensive, so this can only be done by those with strong video cards.
 * EFB Copies - Virtual is required for this to work on the latest revisions.
 * Disable EFB copy before running the game.
 * One must either disable EFB copies before running the game, or enable it then stop and restart emulation; otherwise the game's visuals will be stuck.
 * This solves the distant areas problem but breaks characters shadows, screen blurring (when cutting small trees with sword and other things), and causes the pictobox problem. This is not recommended.
 * The d3d11 video back end will produce DOF blur regardless of efb scale. It is therefore advised to use the d3d9 or OpenGL video back ends.
 * Using a custom projection hack of 0.7 to 0.9 (Z-far) will remove the distant blur with no noticable impact on the rest of the game. This should work on all GFX back-ends and is not affected by EFB copy type.

Black Squares in Dragon Roost

 * Use Zelda Twilight Princess Bloom Hack and EFB to RAM or texture enabled.
 * Blur distant images fixed, shadows work, and the fire effect is correct.

Pictobox only shows black images

 * Don't use EFB to texture
 * Photos taken in this mode it will appear black both when taken and when viewed, even if switching to EFB to RAM later the photo will continue to be black.
 * Don't use projection hack and Enable EFB to RAM
 * Pictobox will work perfectly, but bugs with waiting to see the photo continue.
 * Use a projection hack and Enable EFB to RAM
 * It's essential to use a projection hack or problems will occur: blurred distant images and black squares in Dragon Roost. When using a projection hack, photos will appear black at first, but when switching modes to view photos they will appear normally.


 * With issues with the pictobox should be resolved, as long as "EFB to RAM" is enabled.

Texture flickering

 * Sometimes textures such as waves or shadows will flicker at certain camera angles
 * Use or higher and make sure that Disable Per-Pixel Depth is unticked (off) in the graphics plugin to fix this.

Black/gray screens

 * A black/gray screen crash may occur after certain events in the game. This can be fixed by enabling the "fix item hang" patch in the patches section of game properties (right click the game in the main dolphin window to get to game properties)
 * Be warned however that the fix item hack patch will cause audio issues. Use it only when encountering a black/gray screen crash
 * If you are experiencing the "black screen" crash after cutscenes, manually set the FPS limit to "Auto" or "60". This issue seems to be caused by a rapid FPS jump when the cutscene has finished.

GameBoy Player
Emulation of GameBoy Player doesn't work with this game. It can be enabled in Config → GameCube, but the game will not detect it. (GBA Link is partially emulated since and requires a dump of GBA BIOS and VBA-M with joy bus options to work).

Gameplay Videos

 * The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker - Dolphin SVN3972 x64 (HD)
 * The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Intro (Dolphin SVN r7589 - x64)