Core of Light (the launcher for all six) · Questions · Getting started · Which disc · Help · Report a problem
Skylanders: Swap Force (Xbox 360, 2013) as a native Windows game: your real portal and figures or none at all, a controller, up to 3x the console's resolution, 60 FPS and more, swappers, no emulator. You bring your own copy of the game; nothing of it comes with this project.
Unofficial fan project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Activision or Vicarious Visions.
Can I use my real portal and figures? Yes. Plug it in: the game finds it by itself (F4 > Portal is Automatic), reads your figures and saves their progress on them, as on the console, and the portal menu still has the figures you don't own. Every figure you put on gets a backup file. Real USB portal only leaves the menu out. The PS3, Wii and PC portals work as they are, also with the WinUSB driver a Dolphin or Cemu setup gives them; an Xbox 360 portal needs WinUSB (Zadig), as for Xenia. The Swap Force portal works too. If yours doesn't work, F4 > Game > Report a problem: its log says what the game saw.
Can I play without figures? Yes: without a real portal, a menu with every figure opens when the game asks for a Skylander. Their progress is kept in files in Documents\Skylanders\Figures, and one button swaps back to the Skylander you played before.
Can I play with a friend? Yes, two players on one PC, as on the console: the second player opens the portal menu on their controller (Guide, or Back + Start) and puts their Skylander on. L3 + R3 sorts out which controller plays which player. Online play isn't there yet.
How do I swap without the toys? In the portal menu: put a swapper together from any top and bottom half, as you would on the portal.
Which game do I need? Does my Wii or PS3 copy work? Your own copy of Swap Force on Xbox 360: for now the European Xbox 360 disc (which one exactly), as an ISO or an extracted folder. The setup takes the game's data from it; nothing of the game comes with this. Wii, PS3 and other versions are different programs and don't work.
Is this an emulator? No. The game's code is recompiled into a Windows program, so it runs natively: higher resolutions, 60 FPS and more, a settings menu, the portal menu. Emulators like Dolphin or Xenia run the original game instead; both are fine ways to play.
Does it run on Linux, Steam Deck, Mac or Android handhelds? It's made for Windows (64-bit) and tested there. Wine / Proton may work but isn't tested much; Mac, Android and ARM handhelds aren't supported.
Is it safe? All of the source is here on GitHub. The setup isn't signed, so Windows may warn before it runs (what to click).
Was AI used? Yes, almost all of the code was written with Claude; see How it was made.
The easy way: install Core of Light and show it your disc. It downloads this game, sets it up and keeps it up to date, and does the same for the other five games.
On its own:
- Download
SwapForceRecompSetup-<version>.exefrom the Releases page. - Run it and pick your disc, as an ISO file or an extracted folder. It checks the version and takes what it needs.
- Start the game from the desktop or the Start menu.
What you need:
- Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) and a graphics card with DirectX 12
- your own Xbox 360 disc of the game (which one)
- a controller (Xbox or compatible); keyboard and mouse work too. A real Portal of Power is optional.
Tested on a Ryzen 5 5600 with a Radeon RX 6800 XT (32 GB RAM, Windows 11): a steady 60 FPS at 2x (1440p). Without the frame cap the hub runs at about 135 FPS at 2x, with the native 3D picture on.
The setup isn't signed, so Windows may say "Windows protected your PC": click More info, then Run anyway. No admin rights needed.
- A sharper picture: 1x, 2x or 3x the console's 720p, the 3D scene drawn at the full 720p instead of the console's smaller size, sharpening (AMD CAS, or FSR 1 when the window is bigger) and 16x texture filtering, with the presets Performance, Quality, Best and As on the console.
- 60 FPS, or 30 as on the console, or 144 and more. The game keeps its normal speed.
- Ultrawide: a wider window shows more to the sides.
- No portal needed: when the game asks for a Skylander, a menu with every figure opens by itself, in the game's own look. Swappers are put together from any top and bottom half there.
- A real portal works too, the Swap Force one as well as the older PS3 and Wii portals, or both at once with the menu.
- Your figures keep their progress (level, gold, hats, upgrades) in files you can back up, and each one is backed up before the game first saves over it: the portal menu puts an older version back.
- Quick swap: one button puts the Skylander you played before back on the portal.
- Skip any movie: Start ends the movie that is playing (F4 > Game: off, or A instead).
- A settings menu in the game: graphics, frame rate, language, portal, controls, and Extras (no health loss, full gold, always crit, elemental power everywhere, gold and XP multipliers; off by default, and Show cheats hides the lot).
- 5.1 sound as the game mixes it, or stereo.
- Achievements.
- A Discord status: the game, your Skylander and the level, while the Discord app runs. F4 > Game turns it off.
- HD texture packs: bigger textures in place of the game's own (how).
- Languages: English and German.
Its settings in Core of Light, the same pages as in the game's own menu (F4). The game's own pictures aren't shown here: they're Activision's.
The game plays as it always did. On top of that:
| Controller | Keyboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Portal menu (put figures on) | Guide, or Back + Start | F6 |
| Take figures off | Back + Y | F5 |
| Settings | Back + RB | F4 |
| Achievements | in the settings, under Game | F7 |
| Which controller plays which player | L3 + R3 | F9 |
The settings menu shows the keyboard keys for the game itself under Controls.
The tutorial and Woodburrow have been played through with a controller and with the keyboard, cutscenes and dialogue included, and in automated test runs all 18 story levels load without a crash. Nobody has played it to the end yet, so if something breaks further in, please tell me.
What's tested (as of 2026-11-12):
| Every story level loads | all 18, by script |
| Played by hand | the tutorial and the first level |
| Real USB portal | a PS3 portal reads and saves figures; swapper toys on a real portal not yet (#42) |
| Two players | two controllers, by hand and by script |
| Graphics | D3D12 and Vulkan, by script |
What's being worked on, for all six games and the launcher: the roadmap board, and docs/roadmap.md for this game. Questions and ideas: Discussions. Known bugs and the details: docs/STATUS.md.
The setup says it's the wrong disc. This port is made for one version of the game (see Which disc). If you have another one, open an issue with the message (it names the disc's title, region and hash).
It runs slowly. Press F4, go to Graphics and pick Performance, or a lower internal resolution. The first visit to a new area can stutter for a moment while the graphics card's shaders are made; after that it's smooth.
Voices are missing with headphones. If Windows has your sound output set up as 5.1 or 7.1, the game sends surround sound, and voices on the center channel (in Spyro's Adventure all of the movies' voices) don't reach headphones. F4 > Game > Sound output: Stereo mixes everything down to two channels; so does setting the output to Stereo in Windows' sound settings.
Where are my saves and figures? Saves in Documents\Skylanders\Swap Force, figures in
Documents\Skylanders\Figures (shared by all six games). Core of Light can export all of it for a
new PC.
Why are there no screenshots of the game? They'd show its artwork, which belongs to Activision. The picture above is its settings page in Core of Light, the banner our own drawing.
The European Xbox 360 disc with English and German (PAL, title 415608E9). Its SHA-256 is in
docs/game/default.xex.sha256; the setup, the game and the launcher
check it. Another pressing with the same code (another language set, for example) works as well: they also compare the code part of the file (docs/game/default.xex.code). Other regions usually have other code and don't work yet.
Open an issue with the Problem form:
what you did and what happened. It helps a lot to attach the report from Core of Light (LB, the
launcher's settings, > Report a problem, or the question it asks after a crash). That's one text
file on your desktop with the latest logs and settings, your Windows user name taken out. Without
the launcher, the logs are in the logs folder next to the game's exe.
I wanted to play the Xbox 360 Skylanders games on my PC with just a controller, no emulator, and with a nicer picture. That's really all it is: a private fan project. It's public in case someone else wants the same.
To be upfront about it: almost all of the code here was written by Claude in Claude Code, the recompile setup, the fixes, the portal menu, the launcher and the installer, and most of the docs too. I decided what to build, said what was broken and played the games a lot. If AI-made projects aren't your thing, that's fair.
The game's Xbox 360 code is recompiled to x86-64 with ReXGlue
(no CPU emulation); the graphics go through Xenia's D3D12 path. This repository holds only our own
code: the recompiled game code is made on your PC from your disc's default.xex when you build.
Building needs Windows, Visual Studio 2022 (C++ workload and C++ Clang tools), CMake, Ninja, just, Git and Python 3. Run everything from the x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/tsapZ/SwapForceRecomp.git
cd SwapForceRecomp
just regen-release (code generation; needs the game's default.xex in rom/)
just build-release
just play-release
just package-installer builds the setup. Details: docs/development.md and
docs/build.md; all docs in docs/README.md.
The banner and the button at the top are drawn by Core of Light's tools/make_banner.ps1.
- The players who report bugs and bring ideas: many of them are in the games now. Who brought what: Made with the players.
- GiantsRecomp by TheBiemGamer brought Skylanders Giants to PC and is the template for this project: build setup, tooling and workflow (MIT).
- ReXGlue SDK by Tom Clay is the recompiler and runtime everything here is built on. It comes from the Xenia emulator (Ben Vanik and contributors) and is inspired by XenonRecomp by hedge-dev. Used as a submodule, in TheBiemGamer's fork with our fixes on top; keeps its own license.
- skylanders-portal by TheBiemGamer provides the portal protocol, software and USB portal, overlay and figure catalog. Submodule, in a fork with the shared portal and settings menus on top; keeps its own license.
- extract-xiso is included (prebuilt, unmodified) in
installer/to unpack an Xbox 360 ISO. It keeps its own license (installer/extract-xiso.LICENSE.txt). - Figure save-data decoding builds on public reverse-engineering of the Skylanders NFC format, among others SkyReader.
Skylanders is a trademark of Activision. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Activision.
The code and documentation in this repository are released under the MIT license. That
doesn't cover the game or its data, which you need to own and supply yourself, or the third-party
components in thirdparty/, which keep their own licenses.