Icewind Dale II
2 ports
GemRB
gemrb/gemrb
GemRB (Game Engine Made with preRendered Background): an open-source, cross-platform reimplementation of BioWare’s Infinity Engine, in all eight of its versions, the engine behind Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. According to its own table, Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Icewind Dale, and Icewind Dale II can be played to the end and are polished; Planescape: Torment can be completed too, but lacks a few features. Of the Enhanced Editions it only supports, experimentally, Baldur’s Gate II: EE (its Shadows of Amn part can be finished); multiplayer isn’t implemented. It runs at any resolution without the widescreen mod (the interface stays centered at its size), with whole-window scaling and at any frame rate, supports touchscreens and controllers, and its plugin-based design removes limits of the original engine and makes modding easier; the games’ mods work, except whatever depends on patching the executable. It ships a small demo of its own that runs without any game. Version 0.9.5 (March 23) partly rewrote the audio, with spatial sound, improved controller input, greatly sped up pathfinding, brought the Enhanced Editions’ zoom to every game, and made Icewind Dale II as polished as the others. There are builds for Windows, Linux (also on Flatpak), and macOS. Four of its more than 28,000 commits, all from 2026, say the bug was found or fixed with Claude.
You needThe files from your own copy of one of the original Infinity Engine games (Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II, or Planescape: Torment, with their expansions), installed; the free Baldur’s Gate II demo works too, and with no game at all it runs its own demo. Outside Windows, the game is copied from a Windows install or installed with WINE or unshield. Installing the fixpacks is recommended. Plus Windows (with the Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable), Linux, or macOS.
Icewind Dale II
thierbig/iwd2r
A cross-platform engine for Icewind Dale II rebuilt from a decompilation of the original executable, for Linux, Windows, and macOS (Apple silicon). It keeps the original simulation underneath, with a classic 2D renderer (and an optional SDL3 GPU one) and the IWD2EE mod built into its own source; the plan includes a high-fidelity renderer with a toggle back to the classic look. The repository contains decompiled output of the original game: about 1,690 files in docs/evidence with Ghidra’s output for each recovered function, plus the reconstructed source in src; it holds no executable and no game data. According to its README it has recovered 84.2% of the code and 62.6% of the functions (4.8% verified against the original), and it can’t yet be played from start to finish: a party can be formed, walk, talk, and win the first fight, and saving, loading, and resting is under way. It has no published releases; you build it from source. It states that the recovery work is done by Claude Code sessions (with Anthropic or Z.ai models), and 56 of its last 100 commits list Claude as a co-author.
You needYour own copy of Icewind Dale II: Complete from GOG (DRM-free), which is the reference; the README gives the Windows (2.01) and macOS installers. To build it: CMake 3.28 and, on Windows, Visual Studio 2022; on Linux, a compiler and the libraries the README lists; on macOS, the Xcode command line tools. On macOS the engine builds and passes its tests, but the README says playing there hasn’t been tried.
Questions
What projects are there for Icewind Dale II?
The catalog has 2 ports for Icewind Dale II, all on this page with their status.
What do I need to play it?
Your own copy of Icewind Dale II (Windows). Recompendium only links projects that don’t distribute the game, and each entry says which version or region you need.
Which one is the most popular?
GemRB, with 1,266 stars on GitHub.