I played Animal Crossing on my Steam Deck without an emulator, and it runs better than Dolphin ever did

A reverse-engineered native PC port of Animal Crossing for GameCube has been built on top of a decompiled C codebase, replacing the GameCube's GX graphics API with OpenGL 3.3. Unlike Dolphin emulation, the game logic runs directly on x86 hardware with no emulation overhead. On the Steam Deck, this means proper widescreen support at 1280x800, MSAA anti-aliasing, VSync, 4K resolution options, and 90fps gameplay at just 7W power draw. Setup takes about two minutes: download the release, extract, drop in a North American Rev 0 ISO, and run. Save files are GCI-compatible with Dolphin. The main technical challenge was decoupling game logic from the render loop to support variable frame rates without breaking timing-dependent systems like weather, money rocks, and NPC spawning.