Harvest Moon 64 Got A Native PC Port That Is Perfect on the Steam Deck

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Every day, there’s a new classic game that’s getting its own unofficial native PC port. These ports allow us to play through the original game with a ton of enhancements, while still being very accurate to the original release. Some of the best projects in this regard are for Nintendo 64 titles, and we have seen some great ones for Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark. No, another new one has just been released, and fans of farming simulators will be extremely happy.

Recently, Harvest Moon 64 got its first Native PC port release. Created by Harvest Whisperer and SrBananaMan, the project is using N64: Recomp and RT64, which means we have a bunch of extra features like high frame rates, different aspect ratio support, mod support, and much more. Now, it’s publicly available for everyone to try, so I took a look on the steam deck to see just how great it was to play on there, and it really is.

Just like all of the other compilations using N64: Recomp, installation is relatively easy. All you have to do is download the Linux x64 asset from their latest release in Desktop Mode, put in its own folder, and add the executable to Steam. After that, open it up in game mode and select your legally dumped copy of the game, and you should be all set!

It runs exceptionally well on the steam deck, hitting 90 FPS like it’s nothing. The battery drain is a little higher than I expected, hovering at around 9W-10W on average, which ends up at around 4-4.5 hours of battery on the OLED Steam Deck and ~3 hours on the LCD. But for all the enhancements, it’s worth it. We can also bring down the battery, drained by cutting the frame rate to 60, but I wouldn’t change much else because the higher resolution and anti-aliasing make this game look great.

This is another fantastic PC port for an iconic game, and if you’ve got a copy of it, I highly recommend checking it out on your deck.

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