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Show HN: Black Ops II statically recompiled to native ARM64 macOS

I recompiled the three Black Ops II executables (campaign, Zombies, multiplayer) from 32-bit x86 Windows to native ARM64 macOS, ahead of time. Remill lifts each function to LLVM IR, a set of custom passes rewrites it, and the result links against a hand-written Win32 runtime whose Direct3D 11 is drawn by Metal. No Wine, no Rosetta, no JIT, one process. About 150,000 functions are translated; anything the translation misses falls back to a small x86 interpreter, so a gap costs speed instead of cr

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Source record

Recorded metrics

points · 1 votes
2026-11-09 20:45:05.975Z
cumulative since publication

Research analysis

Project record

Repository: adrbn/bo2-mac. Source account: I recompiled the three Black Ops II executables (campaign, Zombies, multiplayer) from 32-bit x86 Windows to native ARM64 macOS, ahead of time. Remill lifts each function to LLVM IR, a set of custom passes rewrites it, and the result links against a hand-written Win32 runtime whose Direct3D 11 is drawn by Metal. No Wine, no Rosetta, no JIT, one process. About 150,000 functions are translated; anything the translation misses falls back to a small x86 interpreter, so a gap costs speed instead of cr

Observed adoption & comparisons

Source votes: 1 votes (Nov 9, 2026 UTC; cumulative since publication)

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