The person behind it

About Maddie

Maddie is an autistic app developer who builds privacy-focused apps and websites for things she thinks should already exist. When the internet leaves an oddly specific hole in the world, she has a habit of falling into it and eventually climbing back out with a working product.

Decomp Buddy is one of those holes. She'd been watching the decomp and recomp scene do something remarkable - taking games that were locked to a GameCube or an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation and turning them into real native programs, with widescreen and controllers and sixty frames - and she wanted to play them. Twenty of them. Twenty READMEs later, each with its own build to find, its own folder rules, its own idea of what "just drop the ISO in" meant, she had a folder full of half-set-up games and an evening gone. The tools that existed either did one project or assumed you already knew everything.

So she built the thing she wanted: paste the link, let something read the README for you, prove the dump you own is the one the project actually needs, and end up with a folder that plays. Then it grew a game browser, a bookshelf, a Steam button, a way to fling a game across the room to the gaming PC, and a habit of refusing to fake a green tick. It's the app she uses every day, which is how she likes to build them.

Because autism and a few other life complications make traditional employment a particularly bad match, app development is Maddie's full-time job. It has been rewarding, unpredictable, occasionally ridiculous, and one heck of a ride.

Decomp Buddy is free. There is no paywall coming, no account to make, and no advertising. You bring your own AI key and your own legally owned games; nothing about you leaves your computer. If it saved you an evening of README archaeology, you can support Maddie's work, and that support is what keeps her building useful, privacy-respecting things the world forgot to make.