scimitar-recomp

MACOS

A static recompilation of Ubisoft’s 32-bit Intel games on the Scimitar (Anvil) engine into native arm64 code for Apple silicon Macs, iPhone, and iPad: each game’s executable is translated, function by function, into C++ and compiled together with native replacements for everything the game expected from the system, with a Metal renderer. It started with the Mac versions of Assassin’s Creed II (1.0.1) and Brotherhood (1.0.0), 32-bit Intel apps that macOS hasn’t run since Catalina (2019) and that no Apple silicon Mac could ever run; their full symbol tables were the key. Both are playable on Mac and on iPhone or iPad (there, with a controller or keyboard and mouse): AC2 from the start to Florence, and Brotherhood up to the arrival in Rome, without multiplayer. The Windows versions of Assassin’s Creed (the opening and the Animus tutorial), Revelations (the menus and Animus Island), and 2008’s Prince of Persia (up to the first canyon) came later, with a Win32 and Direct3D 9 layer on Metal. It adds any screen shape, draw distance up to 6x, 4096 × 4096 shadows, and 16x anisotropic filtering. There are no releases: you build it on a Mac with Xcode. The repository’s tests include about 2 KB of the LZO decompression routine (a free library) taken from the AC2 executable. The README calls the project “100% vibe-coded”: all of its code was written by Claude Code, and its last 100 commits list Claude as a co-author.

You needYour own copies: the Steam Mac versions of Assassin’s Creed II (1.0.1, downloaded from the Steam console with the command in the README; a normal install brings 1.0.0, which doesn’t work) and Brotherhood; and, for the Windows ones, Assassin’s Creed from Ubisoft Connect, Revelations from Steam, and Prince of Persia from its Mac (Cider) release, which carries the Windows executable. An Apple silicon Mac (Intel Macs aren’t supported), Xcode, and the Homebrew packages the README lists (cmake and zydis; ffmpeg for the videos).

How it gets to PC

Static recompilation

Console

Apple macOS

Architecture

x86 / ARM64

Author

T01iK

Original studio

Ubisoft Montreal

Year

2009

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