Which decompiled console ports run on cheap ARM handhelds?

Ten of them, all through PortMaster: Ship of Harkinian, Ship of Harkinian 2, Dusklight, Perfect Dark, SpaghettiKart, Super Mario 64 Co-op DX, and four Sonic decompilations covering Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic CD and Sonic Mania. Each is listed for between 37 and 40 devices, including budget Anbernics like the RG28XX.

Do I need the original game for a decomp port?

Yes, for every one of them. These ports contain rebuilt engine code and no game content whatsoever, so you supply the assets from a copy you dumped yourself. PortMaster flags all ten as requiring files you provide.

Which decomp ports are easiest to run on weak hardware?

The four Sonic decompilations. They are 2D games running from clean decompiled source and are by far the lightest on the list. Ship of Harkinian, its sequel and Dusklight are the heavy end, with Dusklight being a GameCube era game and the most demanding of all.

Why do so few of these ports have x86 builds in PortMaster?

Because PortMaster serves ARM handhelds, so ARM is the build that gets packaged there. Only Ship of Harkinian and its sequel ship both aarch64 and x86_64 inside PortMaster. The same projects often have desktop x86 builds available directly from the developers.

Every Decomp Port You Can Actually Play on a Cheap ARM Handheld

Q: Are decomp ports better than emulating the same game?

On ARM hardware, usually yes. There is no console being simulated, so the emulation overhead disappears, and the ports typically add widescreen, higher frame rates and mod support. The trade is coverage, since only a handful of games have been decompiled while an emulator plays the whole library.

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2026-09-18 · Explainer

Affiliate disclosure: This guide contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

Every article about decompiled and recompiled console games quietly assumes one thing about you. It assumes you have a gaming PC.

We have written that assumption ourselves. Our own recompiled games on Android guide told you that some projects ship ARM builds and some do not, and that you would have to check each project individually. That was true, and it was not very helpful.

So we did the checking. We pulled PortMaster's own port database and went through it looking for one specific thing: console games that were reverse engineered into source code, then rebuilt to run natively on ARM.

There are ten of them. They are listed for handhelds as cheap as the Anbernic RG28XX. And almost nobody writes about them, because the people covering this scene are testing on desktops.

What Counts Here, and What Does Not

PortMaster has over 1,400 ports. Most of them are not what this article is about.

A lot of PortMaster's catalogue is open-source PC game engines. Quake, Doom, Morrowind through OpenMW, Tomb Raider through OpenLara. Those are wonderful, and you should play them, but the source code was either released or written fresh. Nobody had to reverse engineer anything.

What this article covers is the harder category. A decompilation takes a console game that shipped only as a binary, and painstakingly reconstructs readable source code from it. Once that source exists, it can be compiled for anything, including ARM. Our decomp vs recomp explainer covers how that process works and how it differs from emulation.

The difference matters when you are holding the device. Emulation makes your handheld pretend to be an N64 and then run an N64 game inside that pretence. A decomp port is just an ARM program. There is no console being simulated, so there is no emulation overhead to pay.

The Full List

Every port below was confirmed present in PortMaster's port database on 18 September 2026. The device counts are how many handhelds PortMaster lists each port for.

Port	Original game	System	Devices listed	Architecture
Ship of Harkinian	Ocarina of Time	N64	40	aarch64 + x86_64
Ship of Harkinian 2	Majora's Mask	N64	40	aarch64 + x86_64
Dusklight	Twilight Princess	GameCube	39	aarch64
Perfect Dark	Perfect Dark	N64	39	aarch64
SpaghettiKart	Mario Kart 64	N64	39	aarch64
Sonic 1	Sonic the Hedgehog	Genesis	39	aarch64
Sonic 2	Sonic the Hedgehog 2	Genesis	39	aarch64
Sonic CD	Sonic CD	Sega CD	39	aarch64
Sonic Mania	Sonic Mania	Modern	39	aarch64
Super Mario 64 Co-op DX	Super Mario 64	N64	37	aarch64

A few things jump out of that table.

Not one of them is ready to run. Every single port is flagged in PortMaster's data as needing files you supply yourself. That is the whole deal with decomp ports. The code was rebuilt from scratch and is freely distributed, but the game's art, music and level data were never anybody's to give away. You extract those from a copy you dumped yourself.

Only Ship of Harkinian and its sequel ship an x86_64 build. The other eight are ARM only inside PortMaster. That is the opposite of the situation on the desktop side of this scene, where x86 is the default and ARM is the afterthought.

The device lists are nearly identical. Thirty-seven to forty devices, and the cheapest Anbernics are on all of them. An RG28XX is on every list here.

The Catch Nobody Mentions

Being listed for a device is not the same as running well on it.

PortMaster's availability data tells you a build exists and is offered for your handheld. It does not promise 60fps, and for the 3D ports on the cheapest hardware you should not expect it. Ship of Harkinian on an RG28XX is a very different experience from Ship of Harkinian on a Retroid Pocket 5.

Here is the honest split, by weight rather than by device.

The Sonic four are the easy ones. Sonic 1, 2, CD and Mania are 2D games running from clean decompiled source. They are the lightest things on this list by a wide margin, and they are the ports most likely to just work on whatever you own. If you want to try this whole category with the least friction, start here.

SpaghettiKart and Perfect Dark sit in the middle. Both are N64 3D, but neither is especially demanding by modern standards. Mid-tier hardware handles them comfortably.

Ship of Harkinian, its sequel, and Dusklight are the heavy end. These are the flagship ports, and they are also the ones that will punish weak hardware. Dusklight in particular is a GameCube era game, which is a full generation above everything else on this list.

Dusklight Is the Surprise

If you only take one thing from this list, make it this one.

Dusklight is a native reimplementation of Twilight Princess, built on the zeldaret decompilation and rendered through Aurora on OpenGL ES. That last detail is the interesting part. OpenGL ES is the graphics API mobile and embedded chips actually speak, which is exactly why this runs on ARM handhelds at all.

A GameCube Zelda running natively on an Anbernic is not something that was possible two years ago. Emulating Twilight Princess on that class of hardware is still rough. Running it as a native ARM binary skips the entire problem.

The project used to be called Dusk, and you will still find guides and videos using the old name. It is the same project. We cover the setup in more depth in our Twilight Princess on handhelds guide.

Worth noting that Dusklight is not listed for the Steam Deck in PortMaster, because its PortMaster build is ARM only. Steam Deck owners install it directly from the project instead, which is the better route on that device anyway.

What Is Missing From This List

Two absences are worth calling out, because you will read about both of these projects and then go looking for them in PortMaster.

Donkey Kong 64 is not here. The DK64 Rekongpiled port shipped in August 2026 and it does publish an official Linux ARM64 build, but it distributes that itself rather than through PortMaster. We cover what that ARM64 build actually means separately.

Star Fox 64 is not here either. PortMaster does have a port called Project Starship, and it is not the Star Fox 64 decomp. It is an unrelated indie bullet-hell game that happens to share a name. The Star Fox 64 decomp port, Starship, is a desktop project and is not in PortMaster.

Also absent, and for a clean technical reason: the entire Xbox 360 recompilation scene. Every project there builds for x86 only. The Jak and Daxter trilogy is the same story, because OpenGOAL requires x86-64 with AVX and has no ARM build at all.

Getting Them Running

The install path is the ordinary PortMaster one, and if you have never used PortMaster our complete PortMaster guide walks through it from scratch.

The short version. Install PortMaster on your handheld, open it, find the port in the list, and install. PortMaster pulls the ARM build for your specific device. Then you supply the game files it asks for, from a copy you own and dumped yourself, and put them where the port's readme tells you.

That last step is where people get stuck, and it is different for every port. The readme is not optional reading here.

If you are on an Android handheld rather than a Linux one, Starboard brings a chunk of PortMaster's catalogue across. That is a separate install path with its own quirks.

Which Handheld Should You Buy For This

If you already own an ARM handheld from the last few years, you are probably fine. Start with the Sonic ports and work up.

If you are buying specifically to play the heavier ports on this list, the honest advice is to skip the bottom tier. The

Anbernic RG40XXV

is a sensible floor for the N64 era ports, and it runs the Sonic four without thinking about it.

For Dusklight and Ship of Harkinian at their best on ARM, more power genuinely helps. The

Retroid Pocket 5

is the comfortable pick, and it is on every availability list in the table above.

And if you want the whole scene rather than the ARM slice of it, a

Steam Deck OLED

opens up the x86 side too, which is where most recompilation projects still live.

Questions People Ask

Do I need the original game to play these?

Yes, for all ten. Every port here is flagged in PortMaster's data as requiring files you provide. The ports contain rebuilt code, not game content. You extract the assets from a copy you dumped yourself.

Are decomp ports better than emulating the same game?

Usually, on ARM hardware. There is no console being simulated, so the overhead is gone, and the ports typically add widescreen, higher frame rates and mod support on top. The trade is that only a handful of games have been decompiled, while an emulator runs the whole library.

Why do so few of these have x86 builds in PortMaster?

Because PortMaster's audience is overwhelmingly ARM handhelds, so ARM is the build that gets made there. The same projects often have desktop x86 builds available directly from the developers. Ship of Harkinian is the exception that ships both inside PortMaster.

Will more games get added?

Almost certainly, because the bottleneck is people rather than technology. Each decompilation is a large manual project, but once one is finished an ARM build is usually straightforward. Our recompiled games list tracks the wider scene across every system.

Does this work on Android handhelds?

Not directly, since PortMaster targets Linux handhelds. Starboard bridges a portion of the catalogue to Android. Some of these projects also publish their own Android builds independently, so it is worth checking the project directly.

Port list, architectures and device availability pulled directly from PortMaster's public port database on 18 September 2026. Availability means a build is offered for that device, not that it hits any particular frame rate. Performance tiers in this article are reasoned from each game's original hardware generation and are not measured benchmarks.