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The story
A person believed to be a Google employee sparked discussion on 5ch’s “Hardware/Industry” (Geha) board after posting on social media that they had used the AI “Gemini” to port Nintendo 64’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to iPhone — then deleting the post. Unlike conventional emulation, the method reportedly involved having the AI write out code individually for the target hardware, drawing both astonishment at the technical feat and concern over potential copyright (DMCA) issues and what might happen to the poster. The thread also expanded into discussion of how Nintendo might respond and the limits of Nintendo Switch 2’s security measures.
What people said
This isn't emulation — they've cobbled together something that runs natively on that exact hardware.
It's basically an ultra-precise clone the AI copied by eye.
Even for the same iPhoneDUO, if a different person built it, the code would probably come out different
Great stuff — this isn't emulation, it's ARM recompilation
Let it only play games bought from the Nintendo eShop, or physical game cards via an optional USB card reader.
If emulators aren't treated as "use at your own risk," the optimization and support workload balloons endlessly
Getting stable compatibility across every single title is hard even for the Switch 2 itself
They're probably getting chewed out inside Google right now
I'd guess he's getting fired over this. Since it's not some anonymous account, it'll be easy for Nintendo to take action too (´・ω・｀)
If it's fine, why'd he delete the post?
I really can't understand overseas culture
Same with the PlayStation scene, people are out of their minds
Lol, thinking like a criminal already
If he gets caught, that's on him
Everyone losing their minds in here should go learn overseas copyright law first
Though yeah, he'll probably get chewed out
Even in the US, breaking copy protection to dump game data is a no-go, I'd think
Especially if he got the ROM from somewhere else instead of dumping it himself
You know about the US law called the DMCA?
And yeah, the post where he actually cracked Ocarina of Time seems to have blown up like crazy
Making something similar and actually breaking the protection to port it are two completely different things
For now an update can block it, but it's been three weeks since the exploit with no patch, so maybe they can't fix it
Also the system itself looks like it's about to get cracked too, so this might just be a lost cause
Even with updates it's a cat-and-mouse game — stuff gets cracked again eventually
Sony's kept pushing updates knowing it's a cat-and-mouse game, and that's made data dumping hard enough that the numbers have gone down
Background and Key Points
This port reportedly doesn’t run the game through a conventional emulator, but instead uses AI to generate native code optimized for the specific hardware. It’s a technique close to the “ARM recompilation” approach that has also been a hot topic in the Switch 2 hacking scene, with the key difference from past fan porting projects being that the code is individually written out based on a dumped ROM. In the US, the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) bans circumventing copy protection outright, meaning it can be illegal regardless of whether the person actually owns the game — a point that wasn’t fully appreciated within the thread. The discussion also became tangled up with the broader debate over generative AI, so technical, copyright, and AI arguments all got mixed together as the thread grew.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) board thread “[Great News] Google Employee: “Used the Power of Gemini 4 to Port Ocarina of Time to iPhoneDUO lol”.”
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