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.

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
Using the Pictobox with EFB to Texture will show only a black image. Use EFB to Ram to take pictures properly. Any photos taken in EFB to Texture will remain black even after switching to EFB to Ram.

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). Using the fix item hack patch will cause audio issues. 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
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).