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Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

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Re: Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

#11

Post by OuterVale »

This is one of the most impressive things I've seen in a while. It isn't traditional emulation, and it isn't a decompilation.

It is a static recompilation of the Xbox 360 version. It required a ton of low-level re-handling of things from the 360's Xenon CPU and Xenos GPU.

Not only is it the game running natively on PC, it has also been modded to support all manner of tweaks and enhancements that are manageable in-game, and mod support.

Really impressive stuff.

Release trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJreGbVPDx0

Re: Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

#12

Post by foldor »

ronjouch wrote: post #5
LorenDB wrote: post #3

Similar Sonic projects include SA2 Redux[0] and Project 06[1]. [0]: https://gamejolt.com/games/SA2R/939490 [1]: https://youtube.com/c/ChaosX (best link as there is no official website)

And similar recomp projects include Zelda { Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask } and Starfox. - https://github.com/HarbourMasters/Shipwright - https://github.com/HarbourMasters/2ship2harkinian - https://github.com/HarbourMasters/Starship

Those projects from the ship of harkinian are not recomp. Those are based on completed decompilation projects. So they're not translating the mips assembly to an unreadable C being recompiled. They're true ports from as close to the real source code as you can get.

Re: Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

#13

Post by Borealid »

This is conceptually similar to Ship of Harkinian ( https://www.shipofharkinian.com/ ). If someone cares enough about a particular game to put this level of tailored work into it, wonderful.

There is a down side, though: because emulators handle a much wider variety of games, they get better feature sharing for things like save states, shaders, controller bindings, etc. With libretro things even go a step beyond that and different systems' games can all share the same launcher UI and the same support for things like RetroAchievements!

So a recompiled version is better from a performance standpoint, and might have more game-specific quality of life features, but it also means more development time is devoted to that particular game.

Re: Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

#17

Post by OuterVale »

heavensteeth wrote: post #16

Every time MattKC uploads[0], his video's subject matter appears on HN a few hours later. I'm beginning to think it's not a coincidence :) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMGu6Ng_3yA

In this case the post was made a few days ago, but didn't get the traction it arguably deserved so was given a second chance.

Re: Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

#19

Post by louhike »

LorenDB wrote: post #3

Similar Sonic projects include SA2 Redux[0] and Project 06[1]. [0]: https://gamejolt.com/games/SA2R/939490 [1]: https://youtube.com/c/ChaosX (best link as there is no official website)

SA2 redux looks more like a remake than a recomp. I didn’t know the project though and it seems promising!

Re: Unleashed Recompiled: PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed

#20

Post by perching_aix »

OuterVale wrote: post #11

This is one of the most impressive things I've seen in a while. It isn't traditional emulation, and it isn't a decompilation. It is a static re compilation of the Xbox 360 version. It required a ton of low-level re-handling of things from the 360's Xenon CPU and Xenos GPU. Not only is it the game running natively on PC, it has also been modded to support all manner of tweaks and enhancements that are manageable in-ga…

> It isn't traditional emulation, and it isn't a decompilation. It is a static recompilation of the Xbox 360 version.

And all its real benefits come from the countless manual changes made to it, such as rewriting the rendering code. This is because at its core, especially for now, there's no meaningful technological difference between what the tool they used does vs what an emulator does.

Applications on the X360 were barred from self-modifying, so an emulator can/will statically (ahead-of-time) recompile the executable before jumping to it. Whether this is actually what Xenia (the x360 emu) does or if they JIT / hybrid it to get rid of the lengthy precomp, idk, but RPCS3 (the ps3 emu) where this exact same situation also applies does do this, even via LLVM, so there really is 0 difference. (On the PS3 though, there's also SPU code, which can and does self modify, so that needs JITing).

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