Old PC and console games are suddenly running on Mac, in the browser or on iPad, and AI is often helping. This isn’t just stirring up the fan scene: Xbox has founded its own team for it with XBOX LABS, while one of the most important sites in the decompilation scene is pulling the plug.

Xbox founds XBOX LABS

On October 13, 2026, Xbox also publicly posted an internal memo from Asha to all employees on Xbox Wire . In it, she describes how games have been decompiled and rebuilt at a rapid pace in recent weeks so they run on hardware they were never designed for. Windows versions have been translated for Apple Silicon or brought straight into the browser via WebAssembly and WebGPU.

Xbox mainly sees opportunities in this: making games more accessible, giving old games new life and turning more players into developers themselves, even if that challenges existing business models. That’s why Scott is to build a small team of developers, engineers and scientists. XBOX LABS is meant to work in the open and later share the tools it develops with the entire industry.

The decomp scene pulls the emergency brake

Things sound very different at the decompilation platform decomp.dev. In mid-October 2026, its operator encounter shut down the public project index, the leaderboard and new project submissions. Existing project pages remain online. His reasoning: AI massively speeds up so-called matching decompilation, i.e. translating a game back into readable source code. At the same time, though, projects are being „finished“ with AI in hostile forks, half-baked PC ports are being rushed out in a race, and the term decomp is increasingly being equated with finished PC ports.

I find the move understandable. Many of these projects contain years of manual work by volunteers, and if someone suddenly pushes out an unfinished version with AI, that can devalue the work of an entire community.

Old games on new devices: Ocarina of Time on iPad and open source code

What this looks like in practice is shown by HarkinianPad: the project brings Zelda: Ocarina of Time to iPhone and iPad based on the fan port Ship of Harkinian, with Metal rendering and touch controls. The developer himself writes in the project description that he relied heavily on AI assistance. Important: you have to bring your own ROM, and the project isn’t available on the App Store.

But it can also be done officially: Electronic Arts, for example, has published the source code of Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour on GitHub. This lets fans legally modify the game and bring it to new systems.

What this means for you

For us players, this is good news at first: classics that otherwise only run on old hardware become playable again. The downside is legal gray areas, unfinished ports and frustrated volunteers. It’ll be exciting to see what XBOX LABS actually shows and whether other publishers follow suit. I’ll keep you posted.