The community behind Ocarina of Time's PC port has been secretly working on Star Fox 64.

The Harbour Masters 64 Discord announced the development of Starship, a native PC Port of Star Fox 64. Star Fox speedrunner Rakanai demoed it on Twitch. Harbour Masters 64 is behind Ship of Harkinian - a native PC port of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time for 2022.

"Harbour Masters 64 announces the development of Starship, a PC port Star Fox 64 (aka Lylat Wars)! The announcement on Harbour Masters 64 Discord reads: "Led by Sonic Dreamcaster & Samplywx." "Thanks for the hard work and dedication from many others over several months, we've gotten the game to a stage where we feel confident in showcasing it to you."

Since many years, you've been playing Star Fox 64 on PC via emulation. However, native ports are a whole new level of quality. Emulation is an all-encompassing tool that allows most, if no all, console games to be run on PCs (or powerful devices like a Steam Deck, smartphone, or tablet) to a standard acceptable. Native porting is a more specific effort to get a game running on PC without the need for a complex emulation layer. Native ports are a laborious process that requires decompiling the source code of a game and a lot of development work, but they result in a superior experience. Some of the advantages include:

• High resolution support is available without compromising the user interface or the overall experience.
• Ultrawide support.
• Elimination of persistent bugs present in emulation.
• High framerate support is available without speedup glitches.
• Lower system demands.
• Modding Potential

Rakanai's beta gameplay is very exciting and appealing. The N64-era graphics are still incredibly crisp, even at high resolutions and rapid frame rates. Native ports, like emulation are perfectly legal. You still have to supply your ROM in order to run native port games like Starship.

I have always found that the OpenGOAL native port of Jak and Daxter is superior to emulation. Rakanai announced on-stream that Star Fox 64's Starship port is scheduled to release in December, just in time for everyone's holiday break.