GemRB

Games: Baldur's Gate (Windows, 1998) · Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (Windows, 2000) · Icewind Dale (Windows, 2000) · Icewind Dale II → (Windows, 2002) · Planescape: Torment (Windows, 1999)

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.

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Original studio

BioWare / Black Isle Studios

Year

1998

Author

gemrb

Stars

1.3k

Last activity

2026-10-30 · 1 day ago

Latest version

v0.9.5 · 2026-03-23

License

GPL-2.0

Language

C++

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