Over the last several weeks, we’ve seen many instances of people using AI tools, particularly Claude Code, to recompile or clone software. Some have reverse engineered subscription-based apps, such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps, to cobble together their own versions. Others have attempted to decompile and recompile video games to get them running on other platforms and in browsers, with varying degrees of success. One of the latest AI game porting efforts involved someone getting Nintendo Switch games to run natively on an Apple TV 4K.
Redditor u/FloatingFalafel has released an open-source project called TVPort, a fork of the nxnative toolkit that recompiles Switch and Switch 2 games for the set-top box using a Mac. “Most games run essentially the same on the Switch, but some load textures into memory differently and need to be diagnosed and fixed before the game will run properly,” they wrote, noting that they used Claude Opus 5.5 for this project. Among other things, the redditor claimed TVPort backs up save files to Mac or iCloud, and allows users to choose between target framerates of 30 fps and 60 fps.
Super Mario Odyssey is said to run at 60 fps with “very slight stutters on occasion and some audio issues around waterfalls specifically.” Animal Crossing: New Horizons is seemingly limited to 30 fps, with u/FloatingFalafel (who is also working on native Switch ports for Xbox Series X) stating they hadn’t encountered any issues.
They noted more work is needed to get The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TOTK) running properly, as it experienced thermal throttling on Apple TV during tests. “In order to get games like TOTK running, there are serious diagnostics and even partial rewrites of the game’s engine as a patch in the program,” u/FloatingFalafel stated. “Heavier games like TOTK might never run on the Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen.”
The TVPort repository doesn’t contain any game files. Anyone interested in experiment with it themselves would have to provide their own files — legally obtained from their own Switch cartridges, of course.
Using AI tools to bring games to other platforms is a contentious issue too, including in decompiling and recompiling projects. The operators of one prominent website in that space, decomp.dev, recently said they were shutting the site because the “community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by bad actors using AI. (For what it’s worth, Anthropic has since instructed Claude Code not to recreate existing games.)
For better or worse, the TVPort project offers a reminder of what the Apple TV 4K is capable of as a gaming device. Granted, the Switch is almost 10 years old and, even when it came out, the console was underpowered. Still, the set-top box is a solid gaming system, and a device that can handle much more than reruns of Friends or MLS livestreams.
