The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, released as The Legend of Zelda: Baton of Wind (ゼルダの伝説 風のタクト Zeruda no Densetsu: Kaze no Takuto) in Japan, is an action-adventure game and the tenth installment in The Legend of Zelda series.

The game is set on a group of islands in a vast sea—a first for the series. The player controls Link, the protagonist of the Zelda series, as he struggles to find his sister and save the world from Ganondorf.

The Wind Waker follows in the footsteps of Ocarina of Time and its sequel Majora's Mask, retaining the basic gameplay and control system from the two Nintendo 64 titles. A heavy emphasis is placed on using and controlling wind with a baton called the Wind Waker, which aids sailing and floating in air. Though controversial during development for its use of cel shading graphics and the younger Link character, The Wind Waker was met with positive reception.

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.


 * 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)


 * 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 than 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.

See, , and.



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

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 sidequest doesn't work
To fix this, go to the "Hacks" tab of the graphics config screen and make sure ''Skip Dest. Alpha Pass'' is unchecked. The Nintendo Gallery, however, works without it.

Texture flickering
Sometimes textures such as waves or shadows will flicker at certain camera angles. To fix it, use or higher and make sure that Disable Per-Pixel Depth is unticked (off) in the graphics plugin.

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). Using the fix item hack patch will cause audio issues, so use it only when encountering a black/gray screen crash. Adding too many cheats to the game may escalate this issue.
 * 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
GBA Link is partially emulated since and requires a dump of GBA BIOS and VBA-M with joy bus options.

Pictobox only shows black images
Using the Pictobox with EFB to Texture will show only a black image. Any photos taken in EFB to Texture will remain black even after switching to EFB to Ram. This issue has been "fixed"; the GameINI has been changed to prevent the use of EFB to Texture. No matter what setting you set in the GUI, EFB to Ram will be used.