Retro Porting Toolkit turns code from original console games into modern ports.
It combines modern decompilation and recompilation techniques to unlock capabilities beyond what emulation can offer.
Emulation lets old games run. Recompilation lets them evolve.
Retro Porting Toolkit keeps the original game logic while freeing it from the hardware it was built for. That means native widescreen, modern controls, higher frame rates, online play, bug fixes, modding, and entirely new features, not just a more accurate recreation of the original console.
Preserve the game. Replace the constraints.
Features layer over your own copy while the game runs, rather than patching it. Turn one off and the original comes back.
- The map was already loaded. The screen was hiding it. Game Boy Advance games often load much of their map and overworld into memory at once, and the size of the screen was the only thing keeping it out of sight. Mega Man Zero opens the logical view past the original 240 pixels, 288 recommended and the wider settings still validation targets, so a threat is on screen before it is on top of you. Enemies keep their original spawn rules, so things can still appear near the new edges.
- Boktai still runs on sunlight. Yours. The cartridge carried a real light sensor: the solar gun charged from actual sunlight, and the undead could only be sealed while you had light. A community build keeps the requirement and moves the sensor. Give it a postal code and the weather where you are drives the gauge, empty at night, a bar or three under heavy cloud, full in clear midday, with the full sun point adjustable. Give it no postal code and nothing ever leaves your machine.
- Change the words. Mid-game. Faxanadu is the showcase for the NES framework's text override: dialogue and glyphs are replaced at runtime from a data file, with hot reload, so an edit shows up in the running game about a second later. The same idea carries a whole game on PlayStation, where Tsumu Light, a puzzle game that never left Japan, now reads in English without the disc being touched.
Each console teaches the next. The DS recompiler's second processor began as the Game Boy Advance one. The CD-i's 68000 front end came out of the Genesis work.
From the build log
Every ecosystem, exactly where it stands.: Where every ecosystem stands, including the parts barely standing: the GameCube's own system menu, the CD-i reaching Hotel Mario's title card, and one green dot out of the Xbox research.
Playable today.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: The Minish Cap keeps the routes you walk, so a room you revisit runs quicker, and quicker again next launch.
- Mega Man X6: Mega Man X6 carries an authorized adaptation of acediez's Tweaks, layered on while the game runs so the disc is never patched.
- Super Mario Bros.: Super Mario Bros. as a native PC game, finishable as Pikachu, Samus, Link, Captain Falcon, or Sonic.
Watch it run.
- Five minutes from disc to native.: Street Fighter Alpha 3, taken to a running build by someone outside the core team, now shipping builds for Windows, macOS and Linux.
- Aim a DS shooter with your mouse.: Metroid Prime Hunters in a public alpha, with the DS framework underneath it still research.
- Rewind, built once for everyone.: You are watching Tomba!, but the engine is the point: lifted out of the PlayStation runtime so any host can pick it up.
All game projects · All platforms
You provide your own game files. No copyrighted game data is included.