GoKawiilLet's address the elephant in the room, the 800-pound gorilla next to it, and the bull in a china shop crammed in there by the door: the video below is Morrowind running on my iPhone with modern touch controls at a flawless 60 FPS.
Right below that is another classic, Duke Nukem 3D, also running on an iPhone, fully leveraging the 120 Hz ProMotion display. And for our third example we have Serious Sam: The First Encounter...
I managed to get polished, fully functional source ports of Duke Nukem 3D and Serious Sam running on iOS in a little under a week, burning through most of the weekly usage on a $100 ChatGPT Pro account. Morrowind took considerably longer: several weeks of trial and error, dead ends, and ultimately rethinking how I was working with the AI altogether.
The strange part is that none of this is really my field. I'm a gamer and a tech journalist. I don't have the slightest idea how to code.
There are so many ways AI is changing our lives right now, but I don't think any of them have brought me quite as much childlike joy as getting some of my favorite PC games up and running on my iPhone by myself, in a matter of days, with no training or human technical assistance, simply because I decided they should (and I wanted to see if I could...).
Morrowind on an iPhone is amazing by itself. But the fact that anyone can just DO THAT is nothing short of mind-boggling. Not by requesting a feature from a developer, waiting for a publisher, or hoping an abandoned port gets revived, but by taking an existing open-source project and pushing it toward the particular thing they want.
These truly are strange times.
From Pocket PC Ports to AI Coding Agents
I've always had something of a weak spot for janky ports on otherwise unsupported hardware. When I was a kid, I didn't have a PSP. I had a PlayStation One in the basement, despite it already being 2004, and a rather sad PC. My dad did, however, give me his old HP iPAQ after deciding he had no particular use for a Windows Mobile Pocket PC.
When you're stuck with a PS1 for much of your childhood, you get creative with the resources you have on hand. I had a LOT of fun figuring out how to get just about everything under the sun running on that Pocket PC.
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