# OpenEmperor: reimplementing Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

> OpenEmperor 0.1.0-alpha.2 is a clean-room reimplementation of Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom for Apple silicon macOS. It includes a playable city sandbox and an optional original-economy experiment. Original campaigns and save games are unsupported. The first launch asks for an installed or extracted Emperor data directory. The program is build/openemperor. Space pauses, and F5 and F9 save and load.

- Type: Case study
- Targets: Game
- Category: Independent reconstruction cases
- Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
- Sources reviewed: 2026-11-07
- Added to the catalog: 2026-11-09
- Original resource: <https://github.com/oliverjessner/OpenEmperor>
- Primary source: <https://github.com/oliverjessner/OpenEmperor/blob/cc53e7037dac4ebd4da6b68d382a6e898890716b/README.md>
- Catalog page: <https://awesomerea.org/resources/openemperor/>
- Record JSON: <https://awesomerea.org/resources/openemperor/record.json>
- Chinese version: [简体中文](https://awesomerea.org/zh/resources/openemperor/index.md)

## Requirements & limits

- Xcode Command Line Tools, CMake, and OpenSSL 3. cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=arm64, then cmake --build build --parallel.
- The README names no license.

## Primary sources

1. <https://github.com/oliverjessner/OpenEmperor/blob/cc53e7037dac4ebd4da6b68d382a6e898890716b/README.md>

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## About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources.
Original editorial content: MIT. Linked projects, papers and assets retain their own rights and licenses.