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Yakuza: Dead Souls EX

Jun 2026 – present · Boots to gameplay on Windows, no PS3 firmware needed

A native Windows port of the PlayStation 3 game Yakuza: Dead Souls, made by statically recompiling the original executable into C and replacing the entire PS3 system with a runtime written from scratch. It is ps3recomp's first playable 3D title.

Tools: C · C++ · PowerPC · SPU · Direct3D 12 · HLSL · CMake

GitHub Gameplay video (YouTube) ps3recomp (the toolkit it is built on)

More info

What it is

Static recompilation takes the game's PowerPC (PPU) code and Cell SPU programs and translates them ahead of time into C, which is then compiled into an ordinary Windows executable. There is no emulator in the loop. Every piece of the PlayStation 3 the game talks to (the lv2 kernel, system libraries, the SPURS job scheduler, the gcm/RSX graphics layer, audio, input, the filesystem) is reimplemented natively.

Development began on June 9, 2026, fifteen years to the day after the original Japanese release of Ryu ga Gotoku: Of the End.

What works today

Compiles the game's PPU code, its shader PRX module and its SPU programs into one native executable.
Boots without any PS3 firmware, using a native SPURS scheduler, a native gcm/RSX driver layer and native lv2 system calls.
Plays the intro movies with audio, reaches the title screen, starts a new game and plays through the opening into gameplay.
Renders the game's own RSX command stream through a live Direct3D 12 renderer, with the vertex and fragment programs translated to HLSL.
Lighter scenes (for example the Continue tutorial) run at the game's 30 FPS cap.

What I am working on

Performance in heavy scenes. The crowded New Game opening runs at roughly 19 to 21 FPS: the main PPU thread, the renderer and the lifted SPU work that feeds it each take longer than a 33 ms frame, so no single fix gets it to 30. Profiling and parallelizing those three is the current focus.

Notes

The game's code is not in the repository. You generate it from your own copy of the game (North American disc, BLUS30826 v1.00) and then build.
Requires Windows 10/11 x64 and a Direct3D 12 GPU. Built with Visual Studio 2022, CMake, Ninja and Python.
This is an experimental preservation and engineering project, not a finished port.

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