Lichii: Ocarina of Time build

An unofficial build of the Lichii emulator, tuned for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 (0400486024DEC000, main build E0F3CCFAF50065AE4EA01EB5AEB13B1A45DA3348).

It was put together and tested on a Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB and a 3440x1440 monitor. It is not affiliated with Nintendo or with the Lichii project. No game files, keys or firmware are included: use only a copy of the game and system files you obtained legally.

Download the latest release

The original Lichii README is in README-LICHII.md.

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What this build changes

Visual fixes

Problem	Fix	Source
Water flickers every other frame (Lake Hylia, Zora's River)	The water shader reads a light's texture handle per pixel. The translation fell back to a buffer address the game swaps every frame, so the texture changed every frame. Such a handle now binds no texture.	#778, from Frizti's Fritchii
Blown-out white lights on the walls in Gerudo Valley	FMZ is applied before SAT in FFMA and HFMA2, and half-precision FMZ is translated.	#811
White lights and lower FPS with "Occlusion Off"	The built-in is off by default.	this build
Red line in the Royal Family's Tomb	Noperspective varyings are interpolated perspective-correct.	#820
Textures left without memory when VRAM runs out	Creating such an image now fails, instead of leaving it without memory.	#880

Stability

• Game panic about 2.5 minutes in. "FPS Unlock (built-in)" (#655) was the likely cause, so it is off by default. "Dynamic FPS by Dark" applies instead, as in earlier builds.
• Movie video stays in sync with its audio (imports #571).
• The DMA pusher's fence thread no longer overwrites dma_increment_once. The vi2 and nifm commands the game calls are stubbed (#727).
• A texture alias's newest tick stays at least as new as each alias's modification, so stale aliases are not skipped.

Performance

Change	What it does	Source
Split GPU thread, caches, JIT, kernel work	The main Lichii performance work for this game	#717
Host zstd	The emulator decompresses the game's .zs files itself, for faster loading	#869
NUP zstd on demand	Package members are decoded only as far as reads need	#885
Vertex attribute mask	Pipelines are no longer split by vertex attributes the shader never reads, so fewer pipelines are built and there is less stutter	#408
No once-a-frame bank upload	Unchanged 64 KiB uniform banks are not uploaded again every frame (about +3% FPS in the author's test)	#909
Newest pipelines first	Cached pipelines are prebuilt newest first, which helps after a driver update	#875, from Fritchii
Submit while waiting, pending wake	The GPU sits idle less	A-Man-With-A-Plan-dev/Eglantine
Alias sync skip	No texture alias sync when no alias changed	1Shad0w/Lichii
Zen 3 + PGO build	clang-cl, ThinLTO, Lichii's PGO profile and -march=znver3	release asset

PR #337 (fence-flagged query reports) is left out on purpose. Upstream measured it taking Ocarina from about 48 to 32 FPS at GPU accuracy Low.

Ultrawide 21:9

Ultrawide is not built in. It comes from Ivan0xFF's mod, craftycorvid/oot-mod (MIT). This build adds one thing to it: with the 3440x1440 version of the mod enabled, the hearts and magic sit at the left edge of the screen and the item buttons at the right edge, instead of in the centred 16:9 (#831, commit e0053016c2). Menus stay centred.

To set it up:

1. Import the mod's zip under Properties → Add-Ons → Import Mod from ZIP.
2. Set Graphics → Aspect Ratio → Stretch to Window.

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Installing

1. Extract the whole zip and run lichii.exe.
2. Optional: copy recommended-config/user next to lichii.exe to use the per-game settings this build was tested with: docked, GPU accuracy Low and 12 GB of emulated memory, without ultrawide or frame generation. See recommended-config/LEIA-ME.txt.

There are two builds:

File	CPU
lichii-oot-mario-windows-x86_64-msvc.zip	Any x86-64 CPU
lichii-oot-mario-windows-x86_64-znver3-pgo.zip	Ryzen 5000 or newer. It is faster, but it doesn't start on older CPUs

Switches

Each new part can be turned off from nx2_switches.txt next to lichii.exe. Restart after editing it.

Line	Effect
EDEN_NX2_WATER_FIX=0	Uses the old texture binding for the water
EDEN_NX2_ATTR_MASK=0	Pipeline keys keep every vertex attribute
EDEN_NX2_IMAGE_MAY_FAIL=0	An image that doesn't fit is created without memory, as before
EDEN_NX2_OOT_BANK_SKIP=0	Uniform banks are uploaded again once a frame
EDEN_OOT_UW_HUD_EDGES=0	The HUD stays centred with the ultrawide mod
EDEN_NX2_OOT_FPS_UNLOCK=1	Applies "FPS Unlock (built-in)"
EDEN_NX2_OOT_OCCLUSION_OFF=1	Applies "Occlusion Off (built-in)"

Building

Build it like Lichii on Windows, with MSVC 2022, the Vulkan SDK and Qt 6.8.3 (cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release). The Zen 3 build uses clang-cl 22 with -flto=thin -fprofile-use=lichii-windows.profdata /clang:-march=znver3.

Credits and license

All of the emulation work belongs to the developers of Lichii, Eglantine, Eden, yuzu and Sudachi, and to the authors of each PR above. Every commit on this branch names the PR or fork commit it comes from.

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.txt.