Gears of War 3

360

Gears of War 2 / Gears of War 3 / Gears of War: Judgment (COGBox)

Shagg88/COGBox

Native Windows versions of Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, and Gears of War: Judgment for Xbox 360, made by static recompilation (with a preview of the first Gears of War since 0.3.0), with a launcher called COGBox that sets up your copy of each game and starts it. The Xbox 360 code is translated ahead of time to C++ and compiled into Windows programs; the hardware parts are supplied by its own renderer on Direct3D 12 (or Vulkan, experimental), which offers resolution from 1x to 4x, SMAA, FSR, DLSS, and XeSS, high frame rates, HDR10, ultrawide, split screen (in Gears 2), keyboard and mouse, and DLC and zip mods. The author says it is playable with a few hiccups: in Gears 2 every chapter plays in testing, and Gears 3 and Judgment are playable; on SteamOS (via Proton) there are texture glitches. Since 0.3.0 (October 31) releases are labelled pre-release. The Windows download is a zip of about 510 MB with the already compiled programs, which we haven’t checked inside; the README says it includes no game content. 88 of its 93 commits list Claude as a co-author.

You needYour own copy of each game: Gears of War 2 (US disc, version 0.0.0.5, plus Title Update 6), Gears of War 3 (disc plus Title Update 6), and Gears of War: Judgment (disc plus Title Update 4), as an .iso image, Games on Demand copy, or folder; for the Gears of War preview, the disc plus Title Update 5. 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 with Direct3D 12 and about 8 to 16 GB free per game if COGBox unpacks the image.

360

Gears of War 3 (Carolux97)

Carolux97/Azura

Azura is an unofficial native port of Gears of War 3 to Apple Silicon macOS, x86-64 Linux, and x86-64 Windows. It does not emulate the console: the game’s PowerPC code is translated ahead of time to C++ with the ReXGlue SDK and compiled as a normal executable, and ReXGlue’s runtime stands in for the console’s operating system and GPU; on macOS graphics go through the project’s own Metal backend, and on Linux and Windows through Vulkan. The project adds patches to the SDK (the Metal backend, the Xenos shader compiler, a PowerPC interpreter) and to MoltenVK. A Tauri launcher builds the game on your machine from your own copy, as a folder or ISO image, and keeps it up to date. The repository contains no game data or code: the recompiled code is generated on your machine and never committed. The launcher downloads are in a separate repository, azura-releases; version 0.5.1 is from October 31 and brings online play through a service called Alboria. 6 of its last 100 commits list Claude as a co-author.

You needYour own copy of Gears of War 3 for Xbox 360, as a folder or an .iso image (the launcher identifies the version by the SHA-256 of its default.xex). macOS 13.3 or later on Apple Silicon, x86-64 Linux with glibc 2.35 or later, or x86-64 Windows 10 or 11 with a Vulkan graphics driver; the launcher installs a C++ compiler if missing (on Windows, LLVM clang and the Visual Studio Build Tools via winget).