Jewels 2 resurrected (for PCs)

June 29, 2026 development, jewels2, linux, news, oddhop Comments

In the previous post on Oddhop "resurrection" I (sort of) promised to take a look at Jewels 2, another mobile-only game that has been absent from the app stores for years now — and thus unplayable. After I got Oddhop up and running again for PCs, I couldn't help but do the same for Jewels 2. 🙂

This one took considerably more effort! Jewels 2 uses my own custom C++ game engine and the original binaries were built for 32-bit architectures. I had used Eclipse with CDT to write and build the game. This time I went with a Makefile instead, using MSYS2 with MinGW-w64 toolchain to build. It took some fixing up to get all the code compiling for 64-bit architecture, but no major issues. After the game compiled, I was welcomed with a black screen and lots of errors about the GLSL-shaders! 😛

My GLSL-code from 2011-2012 required a bit of tweaking before being accepted by the shader compiler. Windows drivers were happy with just a #version 420 directive slapped in, but Linux/wine didn't settle so easily. I really wanted to be able to play the game on Linux, too, so I took some extra effort of upgrading the shader syntax to more a recent incarnation of GLSL. Now it works nicely through wine! 👍️

I also did some additional development and fixing up, because the original Win32-version was only for my own development usage; the main platforms were Android and iOS. Meaning I had saved some time by not implementing certain stuff for the Windows-version. Of course now I did have to implement all that was missing.. Global score lists and achievements, ads and in-app-purchase shop all got axed for this new PC-build (v1.25), but otherwise it's the same game as the latest (now dead) v1.24 on Android.

As with Oddhop, there is no support provided for this freeware Windows-version, but you are welcome to download it and try it out. It was quite nostalgic for me to hear the music again after years and years of not playing the game. Hopefully somebody else will also find this PC-build useful. But even if not, I'm still happy to have these two games of mine preserved in playable form. 🥳

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