Retro Porting Toolkit
Live · started August 2026
Find the tools, native ports and people bringing older games to new hardware.
A collaborative publishing system maps static recompilation across tools, runtimes, games and hardware. My work is the website, information architecture and editorial tooling; the community builds the recompilers and ports.
My scope: Product, positioning, information architecture, design, web engineering, publishing system, and editorial workflow
With: Matthew Stanley (Leads much of the recompilation ecosystem and co-authors the site's documentation and game pages); Emissary (Founded the Retro Porting Toolkit initiative); Community contributors (Build and maintain the tools, runtimes, ports, and documentation catalogued by the site)
Choose a console, find a game, and follow its native port back to the tools and people behind it. Retro Porting Toolkit connects a fast-moving community's scattered repositories into a navigable catalogue, with showcase clips, technical documentation and full-text search on one site.
I designed and built that website and its publishing system with AI agents. The distinctive work is the information model: recompilers, runtimes, hardware targets, games, releases and contributors become connected records rather than isolated pages. Contributors can edit those records through the same structured workflow used to build the public site. The community creates the recompilers and ports; my work makes the ecosystem easier to discover, understand and maintain.
My contribution
I am the website author. I defined and built the publishing product: its information architecture, visual system, content model, search, authoring tools, prerendered delivery, media pipeline, and editorial workflow. I shaped and verified the site's initial explanatory coverage from primary project sources; contributors now edit that content directly.
I did not create the recompilation projects catalogued by the site. Retro Porting Toolkit is collaborative: Matthew Stanley leads much of the recompilation ecosystem and co-authors the site's documentation and game pages, Emissary founded the initiative, and TechnicallyComputers, alexbeav, and many project authors contribute to the tools and ports the site documents. Each linked repository remains the authority for its own ownership and status.
Product system
Static recompilation translates a classic game's machine code ahead of time while a runtime supplies the platform services the native port expects. It occupies a space between emulation and traditional source ports. Explaining those relationships clearly is part of the product, especially when a visitor starts from a game rather than from a compiler.
The result is one coherent surface for discovery and depth. Visitors can move from a console to a game, from a recompiler to the ports built on it, or from a showcase clip to technical documentation. Search spans titles, descriptions, and full page text from the same command palette. A local and production-capable editor writes the same structured content the public build consumes, so publishing does not require hand-editing application code.
The site is statically prerendered and ships its own responsive media. That keeps a visually dense catalogue fast, searchable, linkable, and readable without making runtime APIs part of the public experience.
AI-native workflow
Coding agents supported implementation, content normalization, media work, search, and verification across the publishing system. The site publishes an agent-readable authoring contract at /agent.md, so an agent can work against the same Markdown records, attribution rules, and validation boundaries as a human contributor. Every accepted change remains a reviewable Git commit and passes through the same prerendered build.
I remained responsible for the product boundaries, information model, design, editorial judgment, source verification, integration, testing, and release. That distinction matters because the site presents a collaborative technical ecosystem whose underlying tools and ports belong to their respective contributors.