Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour — macOS, iOS & iPadOS

Zero Hour running natively on Apple Silicon Macs, iPhone, and iPad — campaign, skirmish, and Generals Challenge, with touch controls built for RTS (tap-select, drag-box, long-press deselect, two-finger scroll, pinch zoom). No emulation: this is the real 2003 engine compiled for ARM64, rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal.

Built on EA's GPL v3 source release, standing on a chain of community work — TheSuperHackers, Fighter19's original Unix port, and fbraz3/GeneralsX — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes. See Lineage & credits for who built what. The original GeneralsX README lives on the upstream-main branch.

No game assets are included or distributed. You need your own copy (Steam, ~$5 on sale).

What this port actually involved

"Porting" undersells how weird this journey was, so here's the honest shape of it. The lineage below built the foundation: EA's source release, the community's modernization, Fighter19's original Unix port, GeneralsX's macOS/Linux work. What did not exist was any of this on iOS — and iOS is a hostile place for a 2003 Windows RTS:

• The engine assumes a writable filesystem wherever it lives. iOS apps live in a read-only, code-signed bundle. Every config write, cache, and save path had to be rerouted — and the working directory bootstrapped from the bundle itself.
• The renderer speaks DirectX 8. The iPad speaks Metal. In between: DXVK translating D3D8→Vulkan, MoltenVK translating Vulkan→Metal — and DXVK had never been built for iPhoneOS. That took a Meson cross-build and a patch to its Vulkan loader, because iOS confines dlopen to the app bundle (Patches/dxvk-ios.patch).
• iOS owns your process. Open the app switcher and the OS seizes the Metal drawable without backgrounding you — draw one more frame and you're dead on resume. The whole render/sim loop learned to hold its breath.
• An RTS needs a mouse. SDL3 (from the lineage below) delivers raw touch events; the RTS semantics on top are new. Taps defer until the 2003 GUI has processed hover (or menu buttons never highlight), a drag has to decide "selection box or camera pan," long-press became right-click, and a cancelled touch must never ghost-click a rally point.
• And then the bug hunts — the best part. The minimap that rendered black because a 2003 texture-format fallback silently dropped the alpha channel. The EVA voice that went randomly mute because one zombie audio stream held a global "don't talk over speech" flag while chirping forever. Every one chased to root cause on a real device, fixed, and offered upstream.

→ The war stories: Porting Playbook §8 — the bug archaeology → The complete engineering log: docs/port/PORTING_PLAYBOOK.md → How to do this to another game: docs/port/PORTING_PATTERNS.md

Worth saying plainly: this was a human + AI collaboration. The engineering — the C++, the cross-builds, the device debugging — was done by Claude Code (Anthropic's Claude, Fable model), directed and playtested by a human who described symptoms like "the minimap is black" and "I hear chirping" and owned every decision. Neither half ships this alone: one of us can't write C++, and the other can't hear the chirping.

Quick start — macOS

Prerequisites (one time):

# Toolchain
xcode-select --install
brew install cmake ninja meson pkgconf
brew install --cask steamcmd

# vcpkg (full clone — a shallow clone breaks manifest baselines)
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg ~/vcpkg && ~/vcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
export VCPKG_ROOT=~/vcpkg          # add to your shell profile

# LunarG Vulkan SDK (NOT the Homebrew cask) — https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home
export VULKAN_SDK=$HOME/VulkanSDK/<version>/macOS   # add to your shell profile

Clone, build, get assets, play:

git clone https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad.git GeneralsX
cd GeneralsX
./scripts/build/macos/build-macos-zh.sh     # checks deps, configures, builds
./scripts/build/macos/deploy-macos-zh.sh    # creates ~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH + run.sh
./scripts/get-assets.sh <your_steam_username>   # fetches game data you own
cd ~/GeneralsX/GeneralsZH && ./run.sh -win

Quick start — iPhone / iPad

On top of the macOS prerequisites: full Xcode (signed into your Apple ID), brew install xcodegen, and a (free or paid) Apple Developer team.

cd GeneralsX
git submodule update --init references/fbraz3-dxvk   # iOS DXVK is built from this + Patches/dxvk-ios.patch
./scripts/build/ios/fetch-moltenvk.sh                # pinned MoltenVK.framework (checksummed)
./scripts/build/ios/stage-fonts.sh                   # Liberation fonts, renamed as the game expects
cmake --preset ios-vulkan
cmake --build build/ios-vulkan --target z_generals
GX_TEAM_ID=<your-team-id> GX_BUNDLE_ID=com.you.generalszh \
    ./scripts/build/ios/package-ios-zh.sh --install  # assembles, signs, installs

Find your team id in Xcode → Settings → Accounts. Assets ship inside the app bundle (self-contained install); --dev skips the ~2.7 GB copy for fast code iteration.

Where things are

Known issues

• Long sessions on iPad can be killed by iOS for memory (~3 GB+ resident); the app exits to the home screen with no dialog. Session logs (current + previous) are in the Files app under the game's folder. Under investigation.
• Backgrounding mid-game can occasionally crash on iOS — the lifecycle pause covers the common paths; a rare race remains. Save often.

What's next: Renegade 👀

Generals had a chain of giants to stand on. Command & Conquer: Renegade — EA's 2002 FPS from the same GPL source release — has far less: no native macOS or iOS build of the W3D engine has ever shipped (Mac players today go through Wine-based compatibility layers). The OpenW3D community project has real cross-platform groundwork — a DXVK wrapper scaffold and SDL3 build plumbing — with Mac/Linux on its roadmap, and that groundwork is exactly what we built on.

Same methodology as this repo, much deeper water: OpenW3D's Win32 compat scaffold expanded by ~3,000 lines (the engine calls raw Windows APIs for file finding, keyboard state, COM), a case-sensitivity strategy for twenty thousand asset paths, the DXVK/MoltenVK renderer bring-up, the audio/video stack, and FPS touch controls. It's playable today — campaign, cinematics, mission scripts — on a Mac and an iPhone. For scale: this Generals port added ~2,200 lines on top of GeneralsX; Renegade needed ~6,700 on top of the Windows-only source.

Repo drops soon, with the OpenW3D lineage credited the way this repo credits its chain. Same rules: GPL v3, bring your own copy, full engineering log.

Lineage & credits

This port is the newest link in a long chain, and the earlier links did foundational work that this repo inherits everywhere:

• Westwood / EA Pacific — the game; EA — the GPL v3 source release
• TheSuperHackers/GeneralsGameCode — the community mainline: build modernization, VC6→modern toolchain, and much of the cross-platform groundwork, including the FFmpeg video backend authored by feliwir (of OpenSAGE), who also authored the OpenAL audio device work this port's audio stack builds on
• Fighter19/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour — the original Unix/64-bit port: SDL3 platform management, C++17 filesystem/threading, Freetype/Fontconfig text rendering, and the DXVK approach this renderer path descends from
• fbraz3/GeneralsX — the macOS/Linux port this fork builds on directly, integrating and extending the above
• This fork — the iOS/iPadOS port (arm64-ios cross-build, DXVK-on-iOS, touch controls, app lifecycle, packaging) and engine fixes, offered upstream
• DXVK, MoltenVK, SDL, OpenAL Soft, FFmpeg, Liberation Fonts — the load-bearing walls

Engine code GPL v3 (EA's source release → the chain above → this fork). Game assets: not included, not licensed here.