Hercules Recompiled

Hercules Recompiled

A native PC (Windows and Linux) port of the 1997 PlayStation action game Disney's Hercules (all five PAL releases: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish), plus the decompilation work behind it. The game logic runs unchanged as statically recompiled code; only the platform layer is replaced: 1080p, true 16:9, HD sprites, level textures and HUD, a CRT simulation, save states, and a launcher styled after the game's own title menus (in German, English, French, Spanish and Italian) that boots straight into the level you pick.

This repository contains no game data. You need your own copy of the game. Every graphic, sound and code byte of the game is read from your disc image at build or run time, and everything made from it (extracted files, disassembly, HD texture packs, launcher artwork) stays out of git. The prebuilt downloads contain the game's program code translated to x86-64, but no graphics, sound, video or level data: those still come from your disc. The optional HD texture packs (upscaled from the game's graphics) are published separately as the hd-packs release; the launcher can also make them from your disc instead.

Fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Disney or Sony.

Download

Prebuilt for players who don't want to build it themselves:

System	Download
Windows 10/11 (x64)	hercules-recompiled-windows-x64.zip
Linux (x64, glibc 2.35+: Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 or newer)	hercules-recompiled-linux-x64.zip

Checksums and release notes: latest release.

1. Unzip into a folder of its own (the archive has no top-level folder).
2. Start Hercules_Recompiled.exe (Windows) or ./Hercules_Recompiled (Linux).
3. On first start, pick your disc image: the .cue of a dump of one of the PAL releases SCES-00891 (English), -00892 (French), -00893 (German), -00894 (Italian) or -00895 (Spanish), .cue + .bin. The launcher's language picks the release; it asks for that release's disc and remembers it (disc.cfg, disc-<id>.cfg) next to the program.
4. Choose a level in the launcher. Keyboard, mouse and gamepads work; F11 toggles fullscreen.
5. In the game, Esc (gamepad: Select + Start) opens the menu: HD on/off, CRT picture, 16:9 or 4:3, volume, the controls and more, all switched live. Every key is listed in CONTROLS.md.

Windows shows a SmartScreen warning because the program is not signed: click More info → Run anyway.

Updates come by themselves (from 0.5.0 on): on start the launcher checks for a new release, shows its changelog and installs it on request. Settings, saves, the disc path and the HD graphics stay. Options → General → Auto updates turns the check off. Coming from 0.4.0 or older: unzip the new download over your existing folder once, so your HD graphics and saves stay.

HD graphics are downloaded after your first game (from 0.5.1 on): the launcher fetches the pack for your release from the hd-packs release in the background, about 1.6 GB, checked against SHA256SUMS.txt; a second language then only needs the difference, a few to 40 MB. The progress shows on the main menu and under Options → Graphics → HD graphics; once done, HD is switched on.

If that release has no pack for your disc, the launcher makes the pack on your PC, from your disc, at low priority: about 4 hours on a laptop CPU, while you play in the original graphics. It stops when you close the launcher and continues on the next start. For this it downloads, once, about 400 MB from the official sources, each checked against a fixed SHA-256: a portable Python (python-build-standalone), PyTorch (CPU), spandrel and chaiNNer's image helpers, and the upscaling models from their authors' releases (IllustrationJaNai, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; HDcube). It needs 6 GB of free disk space while it runs; afterwards only the finished pack (in mods/texture-packs/) stays next to the program.

Good to know

• Frame rate. As on the PlayStation, the game draws 25 pictures per second (one every second PAL frame). On a 60 Hz screen they alternate between two and three refreshes, which reads as a slight stutter; on a 50 Hz (or 100 Hz) screen every picture is shown for the same time. Generated in-between frames (blending, optical flow, AI interpolation) were tried and looked worse than the original pictures, so the game keeps its own.
• Widescreen. In 16:9 the game draws the extra width itself: scenery, far background and the HUD at the screen edges, and from 0.5.4 also the characters and objects in the side margins.
• Problems? Open an issue with the version (shown in the launcher), your disc's ID (SCES-0089x), Windows or Linux, and a screenshot if you can.

Layout

Folder	What
decomp/	Decompilation of the main executable and the overlays (splat + GCC 2.7.2 / maspsx, byte-identical rebuild), file-format notes (levels, sprites, videos), tools for extraction, HD upscaling and texture packs
port/	The PC port, built on psxrecomp: game configuration, game-specific mods (HD sprites, widescreen, level select, skip intro / direct start) and the launcher
port/psxrecomp	Submodule: the upstream framework
port/patches/psxrecomp	Ten framework changes this port uses that are not upstream (F3/F4 debug overlays and texture-pack tracking across save states; CRT simulation in the GL present path; a hook that lets the game build in its own launcher; a hook for the game's own in-game menu with live settings; the keyboard alongside the gamepad for Player 1; extra builds per disc release sharing one toolchain; a clean debug-server shutdown; the CRT simulation on blended frames; freezing the F4 inspector's picture to mark objects; semi-transparent draws keeping the original texture)

Getting started

The five PAL releases (SCES-00891 to -00895) work: the root of port/ builds the German one, port/versions/<id>/ each of the others (cmake -S versions/<id> -B build-<id>). US and Japanese versions are not supported. Tested on Linux (Fedora) and Windows (Wine); port/scripts/build_windows.sh cross-builds the Windows release with MinGW-w64.

Needs GCC/G++, CMake ≥ 3.20, Ninja, pkg-config, git, Python 3 with numpy and Pillow, and for the launcher PyGObject with GTK 4, libadwaita and WebKitGTK 6.0.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/obaidr1/hercules-recompiled
cd hercules-recompiled/port
cd psxrecomp && for p in ../patches/psxrecomp/*.patch; do git apply "$p"; done && cd ..
mkdir -p disc   # copy your dump here, Redump names:
                # "Disneys Hercules Action-Spiel (Germany).cue" + ".bin"
./psxrecomp/tools/ci/build_emitters.sh
python3 psxrecomp/psxrecomp_cli.py generate --config game.toml --project-root . \
    --disc "disc/Disneys Hercules Action-Spiel (Germany).cue"
cmake -S . -B build-release -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build-release --target psx-runtime
python3 launcher/build_assets.py --sd   # launcher art from your disc
./hercules-launcher

HD graphics are made from your disc on your PC (first start of the launcher asks; about 4 hours on a laptop CPU). They need a Python with torch and spandrel (e.g. the one bundled with chaiNNer) and three upscaling models you download yourself (their licences forbid redistribution), placed in ~/psx-decomp/models/ (or $HERC_MODELS):

• IllustrationJaNai/4x_IllustrationJaNai_V1_DAT2_190k.pth
• Models/HDcube/4xHDCube4Compact.pth
• Models/HDcube/4xHDcube-Alpha.pth

decomp/tools/hd_pack_build.py runs the same build from the command line.

Licenses

The framework in port/psxrecomp and the patches against it are under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 (see the framework's LICENSE). Third-party tools the decomp uses (splat, maspsx, m2c, the GCC 2.7.2 PSX toolchain) are not included here and keep their own licenses. The repository's own code has no license file yet.