Crash2Recomp

Crash Bandicoot 2 Recompiled

An unofficial, non-commercial fan project. Not affiliated with, authorised or endorsed by Activision, Naughty Dog or Sony Interactive Entertainment. Crash Bandicoot is a trademark of Activision Publishing, Inc. No game data is distributed here — bring your own disc.

The PlayStation game Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back translated to native code and run directly, rather than emulated. A launcher takes a disc image you already own, builds the game on your machine, and runs it.

Work in progress. The game is completable from start to finish, but there are still minor sound and graphical issues. Treat this as a preview rather than a finished release, and expect rough edges.

This project contains no game data. No game code, audio or disc content is distributed here. You supply your own disc image; everything derived from it is produced locally and never leaves your machine.

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What you need

Windows	64-bit, 10 or later
A disc image you own	.cue with its .bin alongside, or a .chd. The build targets the North American release, serial SCUS-94154.
Disk space	About 3 GB while building; roughly 100 MB once built
Time	Five to twenty minutes for the first build, once

No PlayStation BIOS is required. OpenBIOS, a free MIT-licensed replacement, is included.

Getting started

1. Run the launcher.
2. Open Setup and choose your disc image. It is checked for complete tracks, whole sectors and the boot serial, then hashed.
3. Press Build the game. This translates the game to C and compiles it. Live output appears below the progress bar.
4. When it finishes, the Play page is ready.

Settings apply on the next launch. If the game is already running, the Play page tells you to relaunch.

While playing

Key
Home	Pause menu: restart, display options, quick save/load, and live lives/Aku Aku assists. On a controller, Guide or Start+Select.
F5 / F9	Quick save / quick load
F7	Save state slots
F8	Rewind
Tab	Fast-forward: hold it, or set it to switch on and off
F	FPS counter
Alt+Enter or Ctrl+F	Fullscreen
Keypad + / -	Volume

These are the defaults. Settings > Input > Hotkeys changes them, and the same page sets the fast-forward speed.

What you change in the Home menu - display options, POST FX, the FPS counter, the assists - and with the volume keys is kept for the next launch, and the launcher's settings show it. Switching to another window pauses the game behind the Home menu; Settings > Input can turn that off.

Saves

Saves live in userdata/, next to the launcher. The Saves page shows the twelve save-state slots with a picture of each. Play from here starts the game and loads that slot, and a slot can be deleted. The page also backs up the memory cards, which hold the game's own saves, and restores a backup; a restore first backs up the cards it replaces.

Controls

Settings > Input remaps both the keyboard and the controller for player 1. For a controller, click a PS1 button and press the button you want; each PS1 button can have two. Press-to-assign hears Xbox-compatible controllers; any other pad (a PlayStation controller without Steam Input, say) is assigned from the list and still works in the game. Names are positions: A is the bottom face button on every pad, Cross on a PlayStation controller. The stick deadzone is set there too.

The keys that work while playing - pause menu, quick save, fast-forward and the rest - are under Hotkeys on the same page. A hotkey can use Ctrl, Alt or Shift, and the page warns when one is also a game button.

Video

Settings > Video sets internal resolution, aspect and output, and has a Post-processing card: anti-aliasing (FXAA or SMAA), sharpening, colour controls, bloom, vignette, film grain, and Smooth dithered art, which softens the checkerboard dithering painted into many textures. The Authentic preset leaves all of it off; Enhanced turns on SMAA and light sharpening. The Home menu's POST FX row switches it on and off while you play, so you can compare.

The renderer is OpenGL by default. Direct3D 12 draws the same picture through Direct3D 12 - the same renderer built for the other API - for systems whose OpenGL driver misbehaves. If it cannot start, the log says so and the game runs on OpenGL.

Mods

The Mods page lists what is installed, switches individual features on and off, and exposes whatever settings each one declares. Four enhancements ship with the launcher and appear once the game has been built:

PGXP Precision	Sub-pixel vertex precision and perspective-correct texturing, so polygons stop wobbling and large floor textures stop warping. Needs internal resolution 2x or higher to see.
Fast Loading	Speeds up the wall-clock pacing of loads. Nothing the game can observe changes, but it does run faster while a load is detected.
CD Speed	Shortens loads by dividing the emulated drive's sector delay. Unlike the above this changes when the game receives CD interrupts, so raise it gradually.
Bezel Artwork	Draws an image of your choosing in the letterbox or pillarbox margins.

All four are off by default. Changes apply on the next launch.

To add one, press Install a .psxmod... and pick the file. It is checked before anything is written, so a package with an unexpected layout is refused rather than half-installed. If a selection cannot work, the page says so before you launch rather than leaving you to read an error on startup.

Frame rate

Settings -> Performance has an experimental, opt-in 60 FPS mode. It runs Crash 2's own game loop at 60 instead of 30 - a real change to how the game executes, not a smoothing filter on the picture. Once enabled it stays at 60 rather than dropping you back to 30.

It is off by default and is a preview. World movement keeps the correct speed (the engine already scales motion by measured frame time and this reuses that), but scripted sequences, cutscene pacing, music and sound timing, bosses, vehicle levels and FMV transitions have not been verified across the whole game. It also runs the emulated PlayStation processor at 200% so a busy frame can fit into one screen refresh, which is the furthest this gets from how the console behaved.

While the game runs, the Play page says whether 60 is holding and, if not, which of two limits you are hitting, because they need opposite responses. If the machine is behind on drawing the frames, lower Internal resolution on the Video page - at 5x the renderer draws twenty-five times the pixels of native and running at 60 doubles that again, so it is usually what runs out first. If instead some frames in a scene need longer than one refresh, internal resolution will not help; that is the emulated console running out of time inside the frame.

If something behaves strangely, turn it off and see whether the problem goes away - that is a useful thing to report. It changes timing, not saved data.

Assists

Settings > Cheats offers Keep 99 lives and a Damage setting with three positions, all off by default:

Damage
Off	normal rules
Keep 2 masks	Aku Aku is held at two, so a hit is always absorbed
No damage	Crash is held in the invincible state the gold Aku Aku mask uses

No damage permits everything that mask permits - it simply does not lapse after fifteen seconds. It does not stop falls, crushing or drowning, does not make enemies die on contact, and switches itself off during the attract-mode demos. Because it holds an invincible state permanently, a scripted sequence that expects Crash to be interruptible could in principle stall; if you meet one, drop to Keep 2 masks.

These change saved progression: lives and masks are written to the memory card as you play, so switching an assist off stops further writes but cannot undo values already saved. The Home menu has the same switches: they apply at once and are kept, while launcher choices apply on the next launch.

If something goes wrong

The Log page captures everything the game prints, and has a Save to file button. If the game crashes, the launcher says so and brings that page forward. Attach the saved log to any bug report.

Sound crackles. Settings → Audio → Latency → Safe.

The game will not start. Confirm the build finished on the Setup page. If it did not, the log there records why.

Developer mode

Settings → Performance → Developer mode reveals an Advanced page holding measurement tools: a TCP debug server, interpreter fallbacks, audio path overrides and tracing. They exist to investigate bugs and most of them make the game slower or worse. They stay switched off, and unreachable, unless you turn this on.

It also shows 120 FPS (developer preview) under the 60 FPS switch. It runs the game loop at 120 - physics every 120 Hz refresh, while scripted animation and music keep their normal speed - with the emulated processor at 400%. In play it reached 120 only in bursts, fell back to 60 the rest of the time and stuttered when it did hit 120, so it is not offered in normal play, and it does not apply with Developer mode off even if it was ticked.

Legal

An unofficial, non-commercial fan project. Not affiliated with, authorised or endorsed by Activision, Naughty Dog or Sony Interactive Entertainment. Crash Bandicoot is a trademark of Activision Publishing, Inc.

Licences:

• psxrecomp, the recompiler and runtime: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. Free to use and share for any non-commercial purpose. Selling it, or bundling it with anything commercial, is not permitted.
• OpenBIOS (PCSX-Redux): MIT. Shipped as bios/openbios.bin; the notice is in bios/OpenBIOS.LICENSE and must travel with it.
• SDL3: zlib licence.
• Qt / PySide6: LGPL v3. The Qt libraries ship as separate files and may be replaced.

Dumping a disc you own for personal use is permitted in some countries and not in others. Check where you live.

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Building from this repository

The launcher is the supported route. Directly:

python launcher/main.py           # needs Python 3.11+ and PySide6
_build/build_clang.ps1            # builds the runtime, both trees

Runtime changes are made in the gitignored vendored tree at _build/Crash2Recomp/psxrecomp/ and recorded as patches in tuning/patches/, with the reasoning in tuning/NOTES.md. Read tuning/NOTES.md before changing anything in the runtime: it records what has already been tried, what was measured, and which theories were disproved.

Tests:

python launcher/test_settings_coverage.py   # every setting has a control
python launcher/test_ui_smoke.py            # the UI builds and its paths run