Jet Force Gemini, Rare's sprawling 1999 Nintendo 64 shooter, now runs natively on PC. A project called Jet Force Gemini: Recompiled translates the game's code from your own ROM and compiles it for your machine, with no emulator in the loop, and it arrives with a feature list the original cartridge could never have offered: mouse and keyboard aiming, dual-stick controls, widescreen, SSAO and bloom, HD texture packs, and a full weapons editor.
The port is the work of VibinToast, and it has landed at an interesting moment. Jet Force Gemini recently joined the Nintendo Switch Online catalog, giving the game its first official home in years. In parallel, and without waiting for anyone's permission, the community has produced a version that runs on the hardware people already own, at whatever resolution and frame rate that hardware allows.
What It Is
The repository describes itself plainly: “A native 100% playable PC port of Jet Force Gemini (N64, US) for Windows and Linux, made by static recompilation. No emulator: the game's code is translated from your ROM and compiled for your PC.” It ships for Windows, with Direct3D 12, and Linux, with Vulkan.
Rare's original was a big, strange, ambitious game: three playable characters, a bug-eyed insect enemy in Mizar and his Drones, open planets to explore, a dog with a jetpack, and the notorious requirement to rescue every last Tribal before the final boss. It is exactly the kind of game that benefits from a modern control scheme, because the N64 controller was never a great fit for precise third-person aiming.
What the port is not: a re-release, a remaster, or a subscription perk. It is the original game, translated into code your PC compiles, with modern features layered on top. No game code or assets are included, and you need your own ROM.
The Quality of Life Features
The README notes that the project's current focus is quality of life, and it shows. This is not a bare port that gets the game running and stops there. It is a version built for a modern display, a modern controller, and a modern player.
On controls, there is mouse and keyboard support, dual-stick controls with a camera-relative left stick and a free camera, over-the-shoulder aiming with a centered reticle and an adjustable aim speed, and the ability to jump while aiming. The sniper rifle gets a fixed zoom so you can walk while scoped, boss fights support dual-stick and mouse controls, and races and Floyd missions keep the original controls automatically, which is a smart touch for the sections that were designed around them. Rumble Pak support and rebindable buttons round it out.
On presentation, the game runs in widescreen, with ambient occlusion (SSAO) and bloom, each with its own slider, plus the option to disable the original level of detail culling and draw distant objects. There is a fly camera on F7 for screenshots that can freeze the world and hide the HUD, and an on-screen readout for FPS, level and active texture pack.
Texture packs are a first-class feature. A separate 4K pack is offered by the same author, textures can be dumped for editing, and HD packs can be picked from a list and switched in-game with F6. A pack can be a folder or a packed .rtz file, and a .rtz dropped into the mods folder is loaded as a mod that can be toggled and reordered in a Mods tab.
Then there is the launcher and tools: a launcher in Jet Force Gemini colors with pages for Play, Profiles, Gameplay, Visuals, Graphics, Sound, Controls, Stick and Rumble, Texture Packs and About, all navigable with a controller. Built-in profiles cover Default (the original game), Modern, Modern and Balanced (Modern with rebalanced weapons) and Extreme, and you can save, switch and delete your own. The F10 toolbar adds cheats, a level warp with a choice of character and entrance, and an items editor for weapons, ammo, health, keys, Tribals, ship and Floyd parts, progress flags and multiplayer unlocks.
How It Works
Under the hood, this is the same recompilation pipeline that has been rebuilding the N64 library, applied to Rare's engine.
The port uses N64Recomp to translate the game's code, configured by jfg.us.toml and jfg.us.syms.toml, with N64ModernRuntime standing in for the Nintendo 64 operating system and RT64 providing the renderer. Notably, it is built on cyscott/dkr-recomp, the Diddy Kong Racing recompilation, which the build scripts download and patch. The port's own code lives in src/jfg/.
That inheritance is worth naming, because it is how this scene compounds. A recompilation for one Rare game becomes the foundation for another, and the patched runtime arrives with widescreen, higher resolutions and the texture pipeline already working. Progress on one project quietly lifts the next.
An AI-Assisted Port, and It Says So
Like a growing number of projects in this space, Jet Force Gemini: Recompiled is explicit about how it was made. The README states: “This project was built with heavy help from AI (Claude), under the direction of the project owner. It has not had an independent code review.”
That is worth flagging honestly in both directions. The disclosure is the right call, and the caveat about the lack of an independent code review is real. At the same time, the game logic itself is the original code, translated by the recompiler, so the parts that determine how it feels are still Rare's. What the AI helped produce is the surrounding tooling: the launcher, the editors, the texture pipeline, the build scripts. Judge the port on the game it runs.
How to Build and Run
First, the ROM. The port requires Jet Force Gemini (US) in .z64 format, with SHA-1 493ced9008dbe932d6e91179b68e8630cf23a023, saved as baserom.us.z64 in the project folder. No ROM is included, and the README asks that you not share the ROM or anything generated from it.
On Windows (10 or 11, with a Direct3D 12 GPU), you install Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload and the C++ Clang tools, plus Git and Python 3, then run build_windows.bat and afterward run_windows.bat. Be ready for the first build: it takes roughly 10 to 40 minutes and about 15 GB of space. On Linux (with a Vulkan GPU), you install the usual toolchain and SDL, GTK and Vulkan development packages, then run build_linux.sh and run_linux.sh.
The finished game lives in bin alongside its saves and settings, with empty mods and texture_packs folders created for you. One important note from the authors: keep that bin folder private, because it holds a copy of your ROM.
Handy keys once you are running:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Select / Esc | Settings menu |
| F10 | Tools toolbar (Alt switches between the toolbar and the game) |
| F9 | Debug window |
| F5 / F6 | Back to the title screen / next texture pack |
| F7 | Fly camera |
| F11 / Alt+Enter | Fullscreen |
Why This Matters
Jet Force Gemini is a game fans have wanted a proper modern version of for a very long time, and for most of that time the answer was emulation with awkward controls, or nothing. Now there is an official route, through Nintendo Switch Online, and a community route, through a native PC port with mouse aim and a 4K texture pack. Both can exist. Only one of them needed a recompiler and a ROM.
The same pattern keeps repeating across 2026: Smash 64, GoldenEye 007, Super Mario Galaxy, and now Rare's bug-shooting space epic. The games are not being remade. They are being recompiled, which is a quieter and more durable kind of preservation. The original code does not change. It just stops being trapped.
Resources & Links
- Repository: VibinToast/JetForceGemini-Recomp on GitHub
- 4K texture pack: vibintoast.com/projects/jfg-4k
- Tech stack: N64Recomp, N64ModernRuntime, and RT64
- Foundation: cyscott/dkr-recomp (Diddy Kong Racing recompilation)
- Requirements: Your own Jet Force Gemini (US)
.z64ROM (SHA-1493ced9008dbe932d6e91179b68e8630cf23a023), plus Visual Studio 2022 on Windows or a Vulkan toolchain on Linux. GPL-3.0, with no game code or assets included.