QuickTake: Dusk Brings Zelda: Twilight Princess to PC, Mac, and beyond
Another win for game preservation
As of May 2026, there are now seven games on my macOS dock that are decompilations. 2006's The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is the newest, available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS - all you need is a copy of the game from the U.S. or EU, select it within the Dusk app, and you're good to go.
I've spoken about decompilations before, as far back as 2022. For those unaware, certain games are reverse-engineered to their source code, meaning that the game can be recompiled for modern systems with enhancements. Take Ship of Harkinian, the popular Ocarina of Time decomp. After five minutes, you can have the game natively running on your iMac or Retroid Pocket 6 with a higher framerate, cheats enabled, or the option to keep some bugs intact.
Over at decomp.dev, you can see countless projects nearing 100% - from Pokémon Snap to Silent Hill, we could be playing these games on an iPhone 17 someday. However, the recent decomp of Twilight Princess is something you should look into now.
A Twilight, Decompiled
Twilight Princess was originally a Wind Waker sequel, but its low sales, combined with the realisation that Toon Link on a horse didn't work as well as they hoped, prompted Nintendo to pivot to a game that relied more on realistic graphics rather than the cel-shaded look. I remember reading about its announcement, but I missed the game completely in 2006, due to being all-in on PC at the time.
The game came to Wii U in 2016 as an HD release, making everything crisper and improving on some elements like the underwater gameplay. But I was hoping to see it come to Switch 2 so I could finally play it on the go. So imagine my surprise when I saw that decompilation efforts were nearing 100%, with a port already being prepared.
Getting the decompilation to work takes minutes - you find your original GameCube copy of Twilight Princess, rip it to your device, open Dusk, find the disk image, and you're ready to go.
There are countless options you can enable, too, such as minimal HUD, moon jump, infinite health, instant skippable text, and more. But it's playing it on the Retroid Pocket 6 that gives the feeling of 'the things they can do these days'.
Playing Twilight Princess via Dusk on the handheld is fantastic, and it's already my main go-to for playing the game. Everything works as expected, and firing up the above menu to tailor the game further only requires a three-finger tap.
I mentioned before that I've got seven decompiled games on my Mac's dock, and those same games are on my Retroid Pocket 6. It speaks a lot to how communities are helping with game preservation with these decompilations that are safe and legal for players to look into. It means that the barrier to entry with some of these games becomes lower, such as Twilight Princess.
If you've never dipped your toe into one of these decompilations, I strongly recommend doing so - they're easy to set up, fun to play with the bonus menus, and you may even find yourself helping to decompile more games.
