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Sep 25, 2026

The release of the unofficial PC remake of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has taken place

Daniel Harper
By Daniel Harper Senior Video Game News Writer
Last updated: Sep 25, 2026
The release of the unofficial pc remake of zelda ii the adventure of link has taken place

Troy Edwards Jr., known under the pseudonym Troygentic, published the project z2rs. The release is a ground-up reconstruction of the cult action RPG Zelda II: The Adventure of Link from the NES, implemented in Rust and designed to run both natively on modern desktop systems and directly in web browsers via WebAssembly.

z2rs recreates the original game's code rather than relying on emulation. Development followed a clean room process: the executable was written from scratch without decompiling Nintendo's sources, and physics and animations were validated frame-by-frame by synchronously comparing each frame to the original running on a reference emulator. The port includes modern conveniences such as save states, time rewinding, frame-by-frame pause, and replay recording.

Visually, the project adds a full widescreen 16:9 mode that does more than simply stretch the NES image—extra decorations and an extended panorama appear at the screen edges to expand the visible playfield. An updated graphics package (high-resolution sprites) labeled version 0.1 is available; it redraws the environments of the opening zones and supports texture scaling from 2x to 8x.

Gameplay additions include a cooperative mode for 2 players that lets two Link characters be controlled simultaneously. Co-op works locally on a single machine with keyboard or gamepads, and also online. For networked sessions the developer implemented rollback netcode and released a dedicated signal server named z2-signal intended for self-hosting.

To avoid legal exposure, the project omits original Nintendo graphics and audio. Instead, users must supply their own ROM of the American NES release with checksum CRC32 BA322865; the application verifies the file checksum locally in the browser or app without transmitting the ROM to remote servers.

z2rs is distributed under the free MIT license, with ready builds provided for Windows, Linux, and macOS on both Intel and Apple Silicon processors. Graphics packs and tools for creating custom textures are distributed via the author's server on Discord.

Independent developer communities have previously produced similar PC ports of classic titles such as Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox, and F-Zero.