Retrokingdom-heartsnintendo-dsdecompilationpc-portretro-gaming
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, the Nintendo DS game, now runs natively on Windows PCs with its cut Stop magic restored
khdays-port compiles the game's decompiled C for 64-bit Windows, with no emulator and no DS machine code, renders at up to eight times DS resolution, and casts a sixth magic the game shipped without code for.
The project puts the trick in one sentence: “The game is the decompilation’s C, compiled for the PC; the port supplies what the Nintendo DS hardware did underneath it.” Graphics, sound, input, the game card, interrupts and the DS SDK’s system calls are all rewritten for Windows. “No machine code of the DS runs: the port has no ARM interpreter.”
That source code comes from the companion khdays-decomp, a matching decompilation of the EU release. Its table counts 23,231 of about 23,233 functions complete, either rewritten in C or kept as verified original library assembly, and each one compiles back to the game’s exact bytes.
Stop works the way the leftovers suggest: enemies in range “stand still for a time that grows with its level,” and damage dealt meanwhile lands at once when it ends. It is on by default, and it turns off under Settings, General, Stop magic, which returns the game to the DS’s rules.
Installing is the easy part. The Windows installer asks for your ROM of the European release, prepares the game data from it, and can add the port to Steam for PC and Steam Deck. The repository “contains no ROM, game assets, audio, video, text, SDK files or game binaries.” The project also says “AI-assisted coding tools were used to help make this possible.”
Ports built this way tend to spread once the platform layer exists, and this one has a list: “Linux first, then, from one ARM64 build, macOS, Windows on ARM and the Nintendo Switch.” Releases are coming every few days, from v0.1.2 on October 17 to v0.1.4 on October 23.
The README doesn’t say when the Linux build lands, or whether a US release will ever be accepted.