A year ago, if you wanted to play an old console game on a PC, you used an emulator. Today a growing number of games have something else: a native PC build made by fans, from the original game's code.
I keep a list of these projects on PortedGames, the site where I track fan and AI ports of classic games. It now has 101 projects across 12 platforms, and the pace has changed a lot recently, so I pulled the numbers.
The numbers (as of Oct 21, 2026)
Of the 101 projects, 99 have a public GitHub repository I could look up. When those repositories were created:
| Created | Projects |
|---|---|
| 2020–2025 | 21 |
| Feb–Aug 2026 | 27 |
| September 2026 | 18 |
| October 2026 (so far) | 33 |
51 of the 99 were created after September 1. One in three appeared in the first three weeks of October. The older ones are the pioneers: Ship of Harkinian (2022), Zelda 64: Recompiled (2023), Unleashed Recompiled (2024) and decompilations going back to 2020.
By platform, Xbox 360 leads by a wide margin:
| Console | Projects |
|---|---|
| Xbox 360 | 30 |
| Nintendo 64 | 14 |
| PS4 | 11 |
| PS1 | 10 |
| GameCube | 7 |
| Xbox | 6 |
| PS2, PS3, Switch | 5 each |
| Wii | 4 |
| Wii U | 1 |
| Other (two PSP projects, Sonic Mania) | 3 |
And by how far along they are: 31 are marked working, 47 are betas, 21 are early and 2 are offline. Almost all build for Windows (94); 60 also build for Linux and 41 for macOS.
Four ways to get a console game running natively
Every project on the list ends in a program that runs on your PC instead of inside an emulator, but they get there in very different ways. This is the split:
| Method | Projects | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Static recompilation | 68 | A tool reads the console's machine code and translates it, ahead of time, into C or C++ that compiles for a PC. A runtime written for the project handles graphics, audio and system calls. |
| Decompilation | 22 | People rebuild readable source code that compiles back into a byte-identical copy of the game, then port that source. Slow (often years), but it allows the deepest changes. |
| Game-specific runtime | 9 | Mostly PS4. The PS4 and the PC share the x86-64 architecture, so the game's own code can run directly; a runtime written for that one game replaces the console's system libraries. |
| Emulator fork | 2 | An emulator patched and tuned for a single game. Still emulation, but sometimes the only way a game runs well. |
Static recompilation is doing the heavy lifting
Two thirds of the list, and most of the recent growth, is static recompilation. A few open-source toolchains made it practical:
- N64Recomp for Nintendo 64. It is behind Zelda 64: Recompiled (Majora's Mask), which has stable releases with widescreen, high frame rates and mods, and newer ports such as Banjo: Recompiled and Star Fox 64: Recompiled.
- XenonRecomp, and the newer ReXGlue SDK, for the Xbox 360. Unleashed Recompiled (Sonic Unleashed) was the first XenonRecomp port and is at stable 1.0.x. Since then the 360 list has grown to 30 projects, including Skate 3 (with its own D3D12/Vulkan renderer since v2.0) and Modern Warfare 2, which supports the campaign, split screen and private matches. More on how these work: Xbox 360 games recompiled for PC.
- PS2Recomp, an experimental PS2 recompiler that individual game projects build on.
The idea is old. What changed is that the tooling became reusable: the hard parts (CPU translation, a graphics backend, a runtime) are shared, so each new game needs much less work from scratch. The pace also lines up with the wave of AI-assisted reverse engineering this autumn: reversedwithai.com lists more than 20 recompilations whose authors say they built them with help from Claude or Codex.
PS4 is different
PS4 games already run on an x86-64 CPU, so there's no instruction set to translate. The PS4 projects instead write a runtime for one game that stands in for the console's system libraries, usually reusing the Vulkan renderer of the shadPS4 emulator. God of War III Remastered is the best-known example. For games that don't have their own runtime, people run tuned forks of shadPS4 itself; there's a write-up on which shadPS4 builds run which games.
Decompilations are the old guard
The 22 decompilation projects are older on average: 12 of them predate 2026, including OpenGOAL (Jak and Daxter), REDRIVER2 (Driver 2) and the Sonic Mania decompilation. Ship of Harkinian (Ocarina of Time) is the flagship, with regular stable releases. The Ocarina of Time page covers what you need to run it.
The one rule: bring your own copy
None of these projects ship the game. You need files from your own copy (a disc image, a ROM or an installed game, depending on the project), and most validate the exact version they support. The list never links to game files, and I don't either.
The list
The full list is at portedgames.com/recompiled-games, grouped by console, with each project's method, status, supported PC platforms and the date it was last checked. It's re-checked daily. If a project is missing or a status is wrong, the contact address is on the page.
I run PortedGames. Counts are from the list as of October 21, 2026, and repository dates are from the GitHub API.
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