Dead Rising 2: Case West Xenon Recomp

Dead Rising 2: Case West — Native PC Port

To play with online feature download Case West from the XenonLive launcher

Play Dead Rising 2: Case West (Capcom / Blue Castle Games, 2010 — the Xbox 360 exclusive epilogue to Dead Rising 2, where Chuck Greene and Frank West break into the Phenotrans facility) natively on your Windows or Linux PC.

This is not an emulator: the game's Xbox 360 code was translated ahead of time into a native program (XenonRecomp / XenosRecomp), running on a purpose-built engine with a Vulkan renderer, real XMA audio, and native keyboard/mouse support.

Status: essentially complete. The single-player game is playable start to finish — it has been completed end to end — and should look right in nearly all places. Verified on both NVIDIA and AMD, on Windows and Linux. A few minor issues remain (listed below); none block progress. Two-player online co-op works (v1.1.0) over XenonLive, through its launcher — the game's own co-op menus, the way the 360 version played it. Started outside the launcher the game is offline and single-player.

No game data is included in this repository or the downloads. You must own Dead Rising 2: Case West and supply your own copy of the game package. This project is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Capcom or Microsoft.

How to install

1. Download the release for your system from the Releases page:
   • Windows: CaseWestRecomp-windows-x86_64.zip
   • Linux: CaseWestRecomp-linux-x86_64.tar.zst
   • Linux, single file: CaseWestRecomp-linux-x86_64.AppImage (same build; chmod +x it and run it. The tarball is the better choice on a Steam Deck — see docs/steam-deck-testing.md for why)
2. Unpack it anywhere (Windows: right-click → Extract All; Linux: tar --zstd -xf CaseWestRecomp-linux-x86_64.tar.zst).
3. Add your copy of the game. You need the XBLA package file your Xbox 360 downloaded — about 1.2 GB, no file extension. On the console's storage it is at:

   Content/0000000000000000/58410B00/000D0000/<a long string of letters and numbers>
   

   Copy that file into the assets/package/ folder inside the game folder you just unpacked (copying the whole 58410B00 folder in also works — or just drag the file onto the launcher window in step 4).
4. Run the game — cw_runtime.exe on Windows, ./cw_runtime on Linux. The first run sets everything up by itself under a progress bar: it unpacks your package, prepares the game's 1,322 shaders (7.5 s on a 16-thread desktop, longer on fewer cores — it uses all of them), and generates the keyboard prompt art from your data. Later launches go straight into the game.

If anything needed is missing, the game tells you exactly what and where — it never fails with a blank screen on purpose. A README.md inside the bundle has a troubleshooting section.

Your saves and settings live outside the game folder (Windows: Saved Games\Dead Rising 2 Case West\; Linux: ~/.local/share/Dead Rising 2 Case West/), so you can delete or replace the game folder at any time without losing progress.

Controls

• Keyboard/mouse works out of the box with the Dead Rising 2 PC control scheme: WASD to move, mouse to look, left-click attack, right-click aim, Space jump, E to use/pick up, Tab for the map, 1/3 to cycle items, arrow keys for the d-pad. The epilogue's photo camera works fully on keyboard too — hold right-click, press 2 or 3 to raise the camera, left-click to take the shot, 1/3 or the wheel to zoom. Every on-screen prompt shows real key icons, and the exact map is printed in the terminal at startup. Rebindable via a kbmap.txt file next to the executable.
• Any controller SDL recognizes (Xbox layout) works, and the prompts switch between keyboard and controller art automatically depending on which one you touched last. Controller vibration reaches the pad, at the lengths the console gave each effect whatever your frame rate (CW_NO_RUMBLE=1 turns it off).

Features

• The whole single-player game: the Phenotrans facility, the story cases, combo weapons, the photo camera, cinematics with subtitles, save/load — completable start to finish.
• 60 fps (the engine's own pacing, surfaced) — the original 30 fps stays available as a setting, along with higher caps.
• A graphics menu inside the game's own options (Help & Options → Visuals): resolution — which applies live, without a restart — display mode, vsync, shadow quality, MSAA (off / 2x / 4x, next launch), frame cap, field of view and mouse sensitivity. The launcher carries the same rows.
• Ultrawide support — the resolution row lists your monitor's own modes, so a 21:9 display can pick e.g. 3440×1440 and the game renders true widescreen, and culls to that width too, so scenery at the far edges does not pop in and out as you turn. 16:10 displays (1280×800, 1920×1200, 2560×1600) render the world taller with the interface letterboxed at full width. Tip: raise Field of View in the options when playing ultrawide; the stock FOV was chosen for 16:9.
• MSAA 2x anti-aliasing by default, a settings launcher, and a pipeline pre-warm plus background pipeline building, so even a first session plays smoothly instead of hitching the first time it sees something new.
• The launcher works on a controller as well as a keyboard — D-pad or left stick to move, A to select, START to play, B to quit — and lists the 21:9 and 16:10 sizes alongside the 16:9 ones.
• Subtitle language from the launcher — English, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese or Korean, the six the game ships. It is read once at boot, so pick it before pressing PLAY.
• Real Xbox 360 audio (XMA) through ffmpeg — music, speech, effects, and the console's hardware loop behaviour.
• Built for long sessions: texture memory recycles over a full playthrough — no whitening or slow degradation on marathon runs.
• A log file and a diagnostic mode for bug reports: every run writes cw_runtime.log beside the game folder's assets/ (the previous run is kept as cw_runtime.log.1), and cw_runtime --diag prints one line per fact about your OS, GPU, driver and display path, and writes it to cw_diag.txt.
• Bink video plays through the game's own decoder; the port supplies file I/O and nothing else.
• Under the hood: 58,345 PowerPC functions statically recompiled to native code, the 360 GPU's command stream executed on Vulkan 1.3, and a first run that builds everything it needs from your own copy of the game.

Requirements

• A GPU and driver with Vulkan 1.3 support (tested on NVIDIA and AMD).
• Windows: Windows 10 or later, x86-64.
• Linux: x86-64 with glibc 2.35 or newer (v1.0.1 and later — Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and anything newer). The v1.0.0 download needs 2.43 and will not start on older distributions; take v1.0.1 or later instead.
• ~3 GB free disk space after first-run unpacking.
• Your own copy of the game (see above).

Known issues (minor — none affect playability)

• The occasional spot may shade slightly differently than original hardware; everything is being tracked and refined.
• On some AMD GPUs (seen on our own RX 6600 test machine; NVIDIA is unaffected): a black square can appear in the middle of the screen during loading screens and cutscenes. Alt-tab out and back, or press Win+PrintScreen — either clears it. It does not affect gameplay or progress. The sibling port shows the same thing on the same hardware, which points at the code the two share rather than at this game; it is being investigated.
• Steam Deck: never run there by anyone on this project. v1.0.0 provably could not start on SteamOS (it needed glibc 2.43); v1.0.1 removes that cause and lets the pad drive the launcher, which Game Mode needs. Everything else about the Deck is unknown, not known-good. docs/steam-deck-testing.md says exactly what to try and what to send back; a report from a Deck owner is genuinely useful.
• No macOS build yet — nothing blocks it in principle; it awaits test hardware.
• Co-op needs the XenonLive launcher — the game only goes online when the launcher starts it (see the status note above); a plain launch is single-player.

The sibling port

The prologue, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, is ported the same way and shares almost all of this runtime: Dead_Rising_2_Case_Zero_Xenon_Recomp. Fixes flow both ways between the two, which is why a defect seen on both — like the AMD black square above — is worth more than one seen on either alone.

Building from source

The repository contains no game data, so a build needs your own package plus sibling checkouts of the (patched) recompilers — the local patches are vendored in tools/ci/, and the Windows toolchain is documented in the sibling port's windows-build-setup.md. The short form (Linux, after unpacking the game and regenerating ppc/ per CLAUDE.md):

cmake -S runtime -B runtime/build -G Ninja
cmake --build runtime/build -j$(nproc)
./runtime/build/cw_runtime --smoke

CI (.github/workflows/build.yml) builds the host runtime on both platforms on every push — it proves the host code compiles; it cannot run the game.

For developers and other porters

docs/ is this project's full working memory, written for an outside reader porting a different Xbox 360 title with the same pipeline: the numbered findings ledger, the transferable gotcha list, the .big/STFS/XEX format notes, and the record of how a near-complete sibling port of the same engine was transplanted rather than re-derived — docs/imported-fixes.md tracks every fix taken across, with its source commit and what re-measuring it here proved. Start with docs/xenia-capture-analysis.md and docs/gotchas.md. The original day-1 dev README is preserved at docs/dev-readme-day1.md.

Its sibling, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero — Native PC Port, is also released.

Support the project

If this port made your day and you'd like to support the work, sponsor me on GitHub — it helps keep improvements coming, and pays for the next port. Bug reports and issues are just as valuable.

Credits and licensing

• hedge-dev — XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp, the recompiler pair this port is built on, and UnleashedRecomp for proving the shape (used as a structural reference only; no GPL code is copied).
• Third-party components and their licences are enumerated in THIRD_PARTY.md, generated into every release bundle.
• This repository's own code is licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 (see LICENSE).
• Dead Rising 2: Case West is © Capcom Co., Ltd. This project ships none of its content; everything the game needs is read from, or generated at first run from, the player's own copy.