Ammaar Reshi took the 2003 Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour engine, freshly open-sourced by EA, and compiled it for native ARM64 execution on iPhone and iPad. The result runs without emulation, using a DirectX-to-Metal graphics translation chain and a set of custom touch gestures tuned for real-time strategy play, with campaign, skirmish, and Generals Challenge modes all functional.
I used Fable 5 to port Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour to the iPhone and iPad!
This is the actual 2003 engine compiled for ARM64 natively, no emulator.
Campaign, skirmish, Generals Challenge all work with touch controls built for an RTS.
Open sourcing it all below!
The port credits Anthropic’s Fable 5 model with core engineering tasks such as resolving build issues, wiring the graphics layers, and managing iOS lifecycle quirks, while Reshi directed the work and performed device testing.
Floating-point determinism problems keep multiplayer offline across these ports, and iOS builds still require manual Xcode setup, signing, and an Apple developer account with no App Store option available.
Many users celebrated the native iPhone ports of Command & Conquer Generals and Zero Hour due to nostalgia for the game and admiration for the technical feat of an ARM64 engine.
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You’re a lunatic
Can you do age of empires next Ammaar?
I used Fable 5 to port Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour to the iPhone and iPad!
This is the actual 2003 engine compiled for ARM64 natively, no emulator.
Campaign, skirmish, Generals Challenge all work with touch controls built for an RTS.
Open sourcing it all below!
Full guide on how you can get it running on your own devices and fun bug stories in the archive if you want to read about the roller coaster that this was!
https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad
@Pshichenko EA open sourced it :) https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour
@ammaar Wow this is incredible! What a classic. Need to port the Red Alert games now haha
@aesopsolo Oh man loved the Red Alert games
@richkuo7 I forked an old repo that had an early engine working on macOS and used that to bring it to iOS hence you're seeing the mix of dates.
@aferg64 Point codex to this repo and tell it to get the Mac version running!
@ammaar i need to port my fave game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri over!!!
@ammaar I just want to get mine working on an old computer and OpenAI codex told me to get steam.
@thethiny @ammaar @Pshichenko The community did a lot of work here, thousands of commits worth to ensure it works on modern hardware. We're talking DirectX 9 era code here, and with dependencies that are either long extinct or needed major leaps.
It ain't just some AI oneshot effort.
https://github.com/TheSuperHackers/GeneralsGameCode
@ammaar i just installed it and it’s working great! ty
@ammaar When can we expect sth like fable from Deepmind?
@ammaar You’re a lunatic
Can you do age of empires next Ammaar?
@ammaar @Pshichenko Suddenly, this feat is no longer impressive.
@beinghamed Porting one more game that is almost ready - even more complex :) and then have a few crazier ideas when I get my quota back 😂
@ammaar commits were from way before fable, were you working on this from before?
@thethiny @ammaar No, why? It’s not about recreating the game. Porting the game is hard when it was meant to run on completely different hardware
@ammaar That was a fun game!
@howlshot They work surprisingly well!
@ammaar Nice! This is a pretty neat port for macOS, although it still had some nasty rendering bugs when I last tried it a few montsh ago https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX
