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 Effects
In Wind Waker, the various fire effects are glitched, resulting in a odd doubling of portions of the screen exposed to the heat effect. These heat effects are used in many places, like Dragon Roost Cavern and hanging torches. The glitches can be fixed by checking "EFB Copies - Disable" to disable the heat effect entirely, but this also disables dozens of effects used throughout the game. This is the only known solution to this problem, and it is not recommended.
 * See, , and.



Sound
The various sound issues are resolved via use of the LLE plug-in.
 * Sound and music cut out at various points.
 * Sound de-syncs during cinematics. This issue has been partially fixed, see this forum thread.
 * If audio throttle is on black screens may occur when audio de-syncs

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.
 * 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 backend will produce DOF blur regardless of efb scale. It is therefore advised to use the d3d9 or openGL video backends.

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

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).

FIX for (almost) everthing: Use Dolphin 2.0
The fix for making The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker work almost flawlessly (not heavily testes YET) is to use Dolphin version 2.0 (x64) ( http://www.dolphin-emulator.com/download.html ). I'm using a 460GTX, i5 760 at 2.8GHZ, 8GB of ram and Windows 7 64x.

The only important setting I think is using the 'Zelda Twilight Princess Bloom Hack', this makes the game look A LOT better.

It runs at 29/30fps, and haven't noticed any bugs yet (only tested for like 15minutes, but looks much more promising than Dolphin 3.0 or later).

Issues this far:

Music in main menu glitches sometimes using HLE, HLL untested since it gave error when starting the game

The waves in the main screen are behind the boat, but who cares really ?

Gameplay Videos

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