Nintendo’s iconic classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is now fully playable on PC, without roms, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated fan.

The “reverse-engineered clone” of the iconic adventure game was posted over to Github, a staggering achievement by user snesrev that counts for 70,000-80,000 lines of code meticulously covering the entire game.

Roms of classic games have been around since the old days of the internet – only they require an emulator to actually run the game itself.

This new release will let you compile it with your (hopefully legally obtained or sourced) rom and let you run the classic Zelda game, natively, on Windows.

Due to the nature of this project, the key factor here is the user has to compile the Zelda: A Link to the Past rom with the cloned code.

If this was presented wholesale with the assets compiled with the now-native code, Nintendo would have shut it down already (they may still considering this is original code being exposed).

A similar project was also recently completed for the original Jak and Daxter game, but its likely Sony nor Naughty Dog will do anything about that because they don’t really care about those games anymore with their new focus on making movies.

The most interesting thing to take away from this project is that true mods for this now-native PC port are possible, not the romhacks your grandpop used to talk about.

Mods for the native Zelda: A Link to the Past PC port could range from a simple “randomizer” that has dungeon layouts and enemies changed up to fans making entirely new content – even a full conversion mod that makes the game into some other franchise or IP.