Life sim games are either the backbone of a relaxing evening, or a secondary life you can throw yourself into too deeply to think about what else was going on. Whether that’s the Sims, farming games like Stardew Valley or something in between, there’s always been a game for most people at some point of realism. But what if you wanted to play Animal Crossing on the go, and as portably as possible. While you could pull out your Switch or 3DS for New Horizons or New Leaf, why not go older, and even smaller. Thanks to this decompilation of Animal Crossing you can now play this Gamecube classic on your H700 line of handhelds! With a catch.
Produced by Github user GabeConway, this Animal Crossing decomp he refers to as OpenCrossing is exactly what it sounds like. He’s essentially taken past Animal Crossing decomps, and worked it down, getting all of that Gamecube performance to run on something as small as your RG 34XXSP. As he even mentions in his GitHub page, he does offer credits on this project to the work done by ACreTeam, flyngmt, and Dia2809.
That being said, there is a lot being done with this port, and I highly recommend checking out the instructions over on his Github page. You do need your own legally obtained USA Animal Crossing ISO, and you do need your device to be running either muOS or Knulli, as those are the operating systems that have been tested so far. But If you have those, you can get this up and running pretty easily, and have Animal Crossing on the smallest screen possible. But there are also a couple of caveats so far as well. This has only been tested on the 34XX SP, and 28XX so far. While other systems may work, it’s important to note it hasn’t been tested quite yet. As well as that, the noted FPS is around 56, but can drop to as low as 40 which for some will be fine, but I’m sure some users may not enjoy the dips.
Alongside that, I always want to make note of the AI notice included on this page. It was stated to be used in the porting and optimization work, but not in the decompiled game code. If that distinction is important to you, please be sure to take it however you see fit. I think it’s just awesome to see these ports coming to light on lower end hardware. With the H700 Gamecube emulator we’ve seen already, one has to wonder, just how far we’ll be able to push gaming on your H700. And only time will tell us that.
