Oracles NX 1.0 brings Ages and Seasons to Switch as native code

Oracles NX 1.0 is out for the Nintendo Switch, and it’s a native port of both Game Boy Color classics, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. It’s a homebrew .nro that runs as native code, with no emulator involved. Toniisound built it on oracles-decomp by kirby-letsgo, a C reimplementation of both games.

Both games live in one app with a launcher. You get save states, a 16:9 widescreen mode, and screen filters (CRT, LCD, scanlines). Controls are remappable, and there’s fast-forward. Handheld mode runs at 720p, docked at 1080p. Hold ZR to fast-forward, press R for the pause menu, and + and − act as Start and Select.

The release ships without game files. You need your own USA ROMs, and the author asks people not to request them. Setup goes like this:

1. Copy oracles.nro to sdmc:/switch/oracles/
2. Put your own USA ROMs in sdmc:/switch/oracles/roms/
3. Launch it from the Homebrew Menu.

Grab the build from GitHub Releases.

Credits go to kirby-letsgo for oracles-decomp, Drenn1 for oracles-disasm, and the devkitPro and SDL teams for the toolchain, libnx and SDL3. The project is free and open-source, and donations are optional.

My take: this is a different animal from an emulator. Someone had to read the disassembly and rebuild the game logic in C, and that’s the slow part. Once that exists, you get features people usually bolt onto emulators, like save states and filters, inside a native binary. The closest comparison is Zelda64Recomp, which took the recompilation route for N64 Zelda. Decomp and recomp are different tools, but they pull the same way: more code you can read, fewer black boxes.