What's old is new again (recompiled ports)

By Summer 2026 it’s impossible to have not noticed the daily announcements of ports of recompiled games to new platforms. AI tooling and it’s relentless approach to problem solving and brute force seems to have made this much easier. This thread isn’t to discuss feelings about that, but to talk about the games.

We’ve had dedicated threads for a couple:

This thread could be useful to track the trend as a whole, with feedback on who has tried what.

  • Mario 64, GTA3, Quake on Dreamcast
  • Wipeout on 32X
  • too many to mention!

Konami Viper to PC (Thrill Drive 2, GTi Club 2)

Got GTI CLUB 2 running but I don’t have a wheel so it controlled badly. Full left/right or nothing.

So I have added:

  • Analog stick control
  • Gyro/motion control
  • Rumble

Plus a macOS launcher

Will tidy things up and submit so everybody can benefit.

Are any of these vibe coded? I’ve got zero interest in AI slop that is really just a wrapper that is no different to JIT recompilation in emulation.

Signs point to yes.

You’d have to check the website for each to confirm.

At this point in time, with the rate at which these things are appearing, I’d suggest it’s probably easier (although not as accurate) to assume they all have been touched by AI/LLM/Agents, especially if they are on github. At the time of writing it’s pretty much impossible for developers to use github and avoid ai. Even a simple commit triggers ai.

Also, regarding your description of what recomps are: it’s incorrect.

There are some similarities between static recomp and JIT, but the two are not the same. For example, JIT uses a lot of cpu/energy to do its translation every time your run the game: if you boot the game ten times it does the work ten times. But with a recomp the translation work is done once, before the game is run, probably not even done on your machine. JIT requires a more powerful computer than is needed for a recomp of the same game. JIT can suffer from performances jitter or spikes if it encounters a tricky section of code. Recomps are easier to mod. JIT is inherently dangerous from a security and stability perspective, due to the read+write+execute memory access it needs, so is not allowed on some platforms (iOS). etc.

JIT (Dynamic Recompilation): translates instructions on-the-fly at runtime as the program executes.

Static Recompilation (Ahead of Time Recompilation): Translates an entire target executable or bytecode set ahead of time (AOT) before execution, generating host source code (like C/C++) or a native binary.

The fact that a vast majority of these are slung through the AI wringer immediately nullifies any interest I might have had which was already rock bottom.