ZQuest Classic

Notes

Thanks to the ZQuest Classic team for over two decades of keeping Zelda Classic alive and growing it into an engine that has produced hundreds of fan-made quests.

The bundled demo quest The Deep is ready to play. For more quests, including the original classic ones, download them from PureZC and drop the downloaded .zip as-is into zquestclassic/quests/; it's unpacked there on the next launch. Many quests also offer a separate music or support pack: drop that .zip in too, or copy its music folder into zquestclassic/quests/. Without it, those quests fall back to placeholder MIDI music that can sound badly out of tune. Each new save file asks which quest to play through a file browser, and the slot remembers it from then on.

The script JIT is on by default and makes script-heavy quests run faster. If a quest misbehaves, you can turn it off with jit = 0 under [ZSCRIPT] in zquestclassic/zc.cfg.

Controls

Button	Action
D-Pad	Move
Left Analog	Mouse pointer (menus)
A	A button (sword)
B	B button (selected item)
X	Ex1
Y	Ex2
L1	L button (item cycling in most quests)
R1	R button (item cycling in most quests) / mouse click in menus
L2	Ex3
R2	Ex4
Start	Subscreen / confirm
Select	Map
Select + A	Open / close the system menu
Start + Select	Quit

Menus and the quest file browser can be used with the mouse pointer (Left Analog + R1), or the D-Pad and Start.

Compile

Run from this port's folder, so patches/ sits next to the clone.

ZQuest Classic's own SDL_mixer fork (MIDI/Timidity only) is built first. It adds the beat functions ZC uses for custom MIDI loop points:

git clone --branch zc-fork-1 --depth 1 https://github.com/connorjclark/SDL_mixer.git SDL_mixer-zc
cmake -S SDL_mixer-zc -B SDL_mixer-zc/build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DSDL2MIXER_VENDORED=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_SAMPLES=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_INSTALL=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_CMD=OFF \
  -DSDL2MIXER_FLAC=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_MOD=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_MP3=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_OPUS=OFF \
  -DSDL2MIXER_VORBIS=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_WAVE=OFF -DSDL2MIXER_WAVPACK=OFF \
  -DSDL2MIXER_MIDI=ON -DSDL2MIXER_MIDI_TIMIDITY=ON -DSDL2MIXER_MIDI_FLUIDSYNTH=OFF \
  "-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-include $PWD/patches/glibc-compat.h"
ninja -C SDL_mixer-zc/build

Then ZQuest Classic itself:

git clone --branch "3.0.0-prerelease.229+2026-10-13" --depth 1 https://github.com/ZQuestClassic/ZQuestClassic.git
cd ZQuestClassic
git apply ../patches/zquestclassic-portmaster.patch
CC=gcc-12 CXX=g++-12 cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DALLEGRO_SDL=ON -DGL_BUILD_TYPE=gles2+ \
  -DWANT_X11=OFF -DWANT_OPENAL=OFF -DWANT_NATIVE_DIALOG=OFF \
  -DWANT_NFD=OFF -DWANT_WEBSOCKETS=OFF -DCMAKE_DISABLE_FIND_PACKAGE_CURL=ON \
  -DWANT_SENTRY=OFF -DWANT_ZUPDATER=OFF -DWANT_GIT_HOOKS=OFF -DWANT_ZC_TESTS=OFF \
  -DWANT_ERROR_CHECKING=FALSE -DCMAKE_DISABLE_FIND_PACKAGE_TBB=ON \
  "-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-fsigned-char -include $PWD/../patches/glibc-compat.h" \
  "-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-fsigned-char -include $PWD/../patches/glibc-compat.h" \
  -DSDL2_MIXER_INCLUDE_DIR=$PWD/../SDL_mixer-zc/include \
  -DSDL2_MIXER_LIBRARY=$PWD/../SDL_mixer-zc/build/libSDL2_mixer-2.0.so.0.700.0
ninja -C build zplayer

Requires SDL2, GLES2/EGL, libuuid, bison and flex development packages, plus CMake 3.27 or newer. The patch lets Allegro run on its SDL2 backend with GLES2 (skipping the vendored SDL2, and backing up textures before a window resize so they don't go blank), plays MIDI music through ZQuest Classic's SDL_mixer fork (Timidity) with upstream's web-player patch set, exactly like ZQuest Classic's own web build, makes Allegro's SDL audio buffer size configurable, and adds an optional software-drawn mouse cursor for displays without a hardware cursor plane. patches/glibc-compat.h pins hypot/hypotf and std::condition_variable::wait to older symbol versions so the build runs on glibc 2.34 and GCC 11-era libstdc++.