Retro Porting Toolkit helps classic games become native ports.
It keeps the original game logic and rebuilds the experience around modern runtimes, tools, and hardware.
Recompilation lets old games evolve, not just run
Retro Porting Toolkit frees game logic from the hardware it was written for. The result is a native app with room for widescreen, modern controls, higher frame rates, bug fixes, translations, modding, and ideas that go far beyond recreating the original console.
Preserve it. Expand it. Reinvent it.
A recomp can preserve a game, expand it, or use it as the starting point for something new. What matters is being clear about the project’s intent and building deliberately toward it.
- Widescreen that shows more of the level Mega Man Zero opens its logical view beyond the original 240-pixel screen instead of stretching the picture. The wider view lets a threat appear before it is on top of you, while the game’s original enemy-spawn rules remain visible as part of the experiment.
- Boktai’s solar sensor now reads your local weather The cartridge carried a real light sensor: the solar gun charged from sunlight, and the undead could only be sealed while you had light. The recomp keeps the idea and moves the sensor—local weather now drives the gauge while the original game file stays untouched.
- Rewrite a game’s text while it is running Faxanadu showcases NESRecomp’s text overrides: dialogue and glyphs come from a JSON file at runtime, so an edit can appear in the running game without rebuilding or patching the ROM. The same idea scales from a corrected line to a full translation.
Each console teaches the next. The Nintendo DS recompiler’s second processor grew from the Game Boy Advance work. The CD-i’s 68000 frontend, the part that reads that processor’s instructions, grew from the Genesis work. A new platform is not a restart when the tools are built to travel.
From the build log
Every ecosystem, and what it taught the next.: A tour of shared mod loading, adaptive widescreen, new console support, unusual cartridge sensors, and experiments beyond faithful ports.
Playable today.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: The Minish Cap runs natively from the cartridge dump you provide, then opens rooms and overworld scenes into adaptive widescreen instead of stretching them.
- Mega Man X6: Mega Man X6 carries an authorized 203-item adaptation of acediez’s Tweaks, layered over the native port without rewriting the disc image you provide.
- Super Mario Bros.: Super Mario Bros. runs natively with Pikachu, Captain Falcon, Samus, Link, or Sonic taking the lead—and bringing their own moves with them.
Watch it run.
- Five minutes from disc to native.: Street Fighter Alpha 3 became a running native build after roughly five minutes of game-specific setup, then shipped builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Aim a DS shooter with your mouse.: Metroid Prime Hunters is a public native alpha with mouse aiming, running while the Nintendo DS framework beneath it is still active research.
- Rewind, built once for everyone.: You are watching Tomba!, but the reusable engine is the point: save states and rewind are built once so future hosts can pick them up.
All game projects · All platforms
You provide your own game files. No copyrighted game data is included.