There’s now an unofficial Animal Crossing port for these ~$50 ANBERNIC handhelds

It’s been a great year for unofficial ports of classic console games to modern platforms. We’ve already seen fan ports of games like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Twilight Princess, and Skate 3, but we were also particularly happy to see Animal Crossing being unofficially ported to PC and the web. Now, the influential GameCube title has received an unofficial, native port to some ANBERNIC handhelds.

Developer GabeConway has released an Animal Crossing port, dubbed OpenCrossing, for ANBERNIC handhelds that can run the MuOS or Knulli platforms. All the supported handhelds use the low-end AllWinner H700 chip (quad-core Cortex-A53). These devices include the RG28XX, RG34XX, RG34XX-SP, RG35XX series, RG40XX range, and  RG Cube XX. Unfortunately, devices without the H700 chip aren’t expected to work.

What else to know about this Animal Crossing port?

In any event, installing OpenCrossing seems easy enough, but you do need a US copy of Animal Crossing for the GameCube. This isn’t a surprise, as almost all unofficial ports require the game ROM or ISO. This is also a sensible way to ensure that the port doesn’t get shut down due to the distribution of copyrighted assets.

The developer reiterates that this isn’t emulation and that the game’s code is running natively on the CPU. However, he notes that a translation layer is used to run the GameCube’s graphics calls. So what does that mean for performance?

You can apparently expect ~56fps on average on the RG34XX-SP, with dips to ~40fps in demanding areas. That doesn’t sound like much, but this is still a big deal for owners of low-end Linux handhelds. These handhelds generally don’t have enough horsepower to emulate GameCube titles, but a native port like this brings a major performance boost and playable speeds. It’s particularly noteworthy given that some of these handhelds, like the RG28XX, are available for under $50. Now, about bringing this port to Android devices too.