Expanding the *recomp ecosystem with GBARecomp
1379.tech · 1379.tech · 2026-06-24
The first 32-bit target: ARM/THUMB interworking, the GBA BIOS as the first bootable binary, and five games booting to playable states.
This post announces GBARecomp, the project's first 32-bit target. The ARM7TDMI brings a challenge none of the earlier consoles had: ARM/THUMB interworking, where the CPU switches between two instruction encodings mid-program and the recompiler has to follow it across the boundary.
The bring-up path is telling. The first binary GBARecomp ever booted was the GBA BIOS itself, and by the time of this announcement five games were booting to playable states. The framework backs its static output with a fallback interpreter plus a JIT that emits native shards, so code the static pass cannot resolve still runs while coverage improves.
The post is also explicit about provenance from day one: the framework requires the user's own legally obtained BIOS and ROMs, and distributes neither. As the fourth-plus ecosystem built on the same playbook, GBARecomp is the strongest evidence to that point that the approach generalizes across architectures rather than being a MIPS or 6502 trick.
Related: Game Boy Advance, including The Minish Cap and Mega Man Zero.