# Athelas

> Athelas is a free launcher for three Lord of the Rings games on Windows: native PC ports of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King for the Xbox, plus a fix for the 2003 PC game.

Web page: https://emulationking.com/microsoft/xbox/games/lordoftheringsthereturnoftheking/ports/athelas/
Page updated: 2026-10-28

- Developer: Shagg88
- Port type: Recompilation (A tool translated the game's original machine code into C automatically, which was then built as a native PC program.)
- Game: [The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King](https://emulationking.com/microsoft/xbox/games/lordoftheringsthereturnoftheking/index.md)
- AI use: AI-assisted. The project says: “I'm Shagg and I created this project with the help of Claude (Anthropic).”
- Source code: https://github.com/Shagg88/Athelas
- Runs on: Windows

What you need: Your own copies of the games: the US Xbox releases of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King as `.iso` disc images or extracted files, and/or The Return of the King for PC installed. 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 with a Direct3D 12 graphics card (Linux and the Steam Deck through Proton).

Athelas, by Shagg, is an unofficial launcher for three Lord of the Rings games, so they can be played from one place on a modern Windows PC. The Xbox versions of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King each come as a native PC port, made by statically recompiling the game's own program with XboxXBE-Recomp. The Return of the King for PC (2003) is played through ROTK Fix, which draws the game through DXVK, reads controllers through SDL3 and restores its 3D sound and EAX reverb.

The Xbox ports play as they did on the console by default; widescreen and ultrawide, higher frame rates (up to 240 in The Return of the King), sharper text and cutscenes, keyboard and mouse and other improvements are settings. The Fellowship of the Ring, added in 1.4, also has field of view, difficulty, cheats as switches and achievements. Native ARM64 builds of the ports come in a separate download for Windows on ARM.

The launcher shows the games as boxes on a carousel and adds save backups, a log folder per play, mods from a zip for the PC game, desktop shortcuts and 11 languages. The developer says it was made with the help of Claude. No game files are included: the Xbox ports read the player's own US discs, and only skip the console's check for an original Xbox disc.

## How to set it up

1. Download the zip (or the ARM64 zip for Windows on ARM) and extract it into a folder of its own, not a game folder.
2. Run `Athelas.exe` and show it where your games are. The Xbox games are only read; for the PC game it adds ROTK Fix's files next to `rotk.exe`.
3. Pick a game on the carousel and press Play.

## Latest builds

Download these from the web page: https://emulationking.com/microsoft/xbox/games/lordoftheringsthereturnoftheking/ports/athelas/#download

- for Windows (ARM64): 1.7.1 (2026-10-28)
- for Windows: 1.7.1 (2026-10-28)