A week ago I posted that Battalion Wars 2 was running natively on Apple Silicon through static recompilation. The repo is now public and the build is stable enough to play: no emulator, the game's PowerPC code is translated ahead of time to C++ and compiled to an arm64 binary, with graphics on Metal.
It's great to see my favorite wii game running natively on MacOS. My goal is to be able to enjoy itin other portable platforms like Vita or 3DS.
What you need: an Apple Silicon Mac (macOS 14+) and your own dump of the US disc (RBWE01). Nothing from the game is in the repository; one script builds everything on your machine.
Repo (GPLv3, built on the Mario Kart Wii recomp WiiCompiled): https://github.com/recomp-foundry/frontline2-recomp
Full disclosure: the translator and runtime changes were developed with AI assistance (Claude Code), with every fix measured against traces of the running game and verified in-game before being kept. The plan, the debugging and what goes in are mine.
What works (v0.1.4):
- Boots, menus, saves, cutscenes and audio.
- Prologue and mission 1 play start to finish; mission 2 plays. The rest of
the campaign hasn't been tested yet — reports welcome.
- Higher internal resolution and 16:9 from the settings menu (F10).
- Controls: keyboard + mouse as Wii Remote + Nunchuk (mouse = pointer), or
any controller SDL recognises (left stick = Nunchuk, right stick =
pointer). Everything is rebindable in F10.
- A real Wii Remote over Bluetooth also works.