4 Sep 2026
Retro Recompilation Wave. Mario Kart Wii, Sonic, and More
Old games aren't just being emulated anymore, they're being rebuilt. This week's biggest retro gaming story is a case in point: Mario Kart Wii has technically reached Apple TV, but not through emulation. A project called KartPad is statically recompiling the Wii classic into native ARM64 code, and while headlines are calling it a working port, the tvOS build is actually an untested hardware preview. It's one of several signs that fan projects are moving past preservation and into full-on reconstruction from a from-scratch PC rebuild of Sonic and the Secret Rings to hardware makers designing devices around a single retro system rather than another do-it-all handheld