Retro Port — Development skill for Claude Code

retro-port

A Claude Code skill that ports old Windows PC games **you own** to the browser.

Tell Claude which game you want to play, point it at your installed copy, and it does the rest: checks whether the game can be ported, sets up the tools, recompiles the game's executable for the web, gets it running and hands you one command to play it in Chrome, Edge or Safari. If the game has local multiplayer, it can also add **online 1v1**.

"I have EA Cricket 07 installed in ~/Games/Cricket07. Can you make it run in my browser?"

It was built while porting **EA Sports Cricket 07** and **Rugby 06** to the browser; both now run there with online 1v1 built in. The skill packages that toolchain and everything learned along the way.

How it works

Nothing is emulated. The game's x86 machine code is **statically recompiled** into C (one C function per original function), then compiled to WebAssembly. The Windows functions the game calls, including Direct3D 8, DirectSound and DirectInput, are reimplemented, with Direct3D 8 translated to WebGPU. The game's own code runs unchanged on top. For online play, the game runs in a **deterministic** mode (a virtual clock and a fixed thread schedule), so two players who exchange only controller inputs compute exactly the same match.

What it can port

Best fit: **32-bit Windows games from about 1999 to 2008 that use Direct3D 8**, without copy protection. The skill's survey tells you within seconds whether a game qualifies:

• Go: 32-bit, unprotected, Direct3D 8 (or no 3D)
• Hard: Direct3D 9, DirectDraw or OpenGL. Possible, but a large extension of the graphics layer comes first.
• Stop: copy-protected or packed (SecuROM, SafeDisc, StarForce, Steam DRM, ...) or 64-bit

Porting a new game is still real engineering: expect many hours of Claude's work across several sessions, and the possibility that a game needs something the toolchain doesn't have yet.

Install

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Dhaiwat1