F-Zero X: Recompiled

F-Zero X: Recompiled

Made with AI. Almost all of the code, documentation and tests in this repo were written by AI agents (Claude), directed and play-tested by a person. None of it is offered to the upstream projects it builds on, which don't take AI-written code.

A native PC port of the N64 F-Zero X (USA), made by static recompilation (N64Recomp + N64ModernRuntime + RT64, with RecompFrontend's launcher and menus): the game's own MIPS code translated to C and run natively, with RT64 drawing it. The symbols come from the inspectredc/fzerox decompilation. It is not an emulator.

The repo holds no ROM, no asset from the game and no data extracted from it: you supply your own ROM, and nothing in git or CI is made from one except the symbol names and addresses in syms/.

Status: the desktop build boots to the title, plays the attract demo's races (split screen too) and goes through the menus into a Grand Prix race, with sound (the audio microcode recompiled), SRAM saves and keyboard and gamepad input. The game's own graphics microcode, F3DFLX2, is drawn with its alpha light, which gives the machines their paint and shading (runtime-patches/). Races interpolate to the display's rate (patches/interpolation.c): each camera, machine, shadow and booster glow is blended between two game frames by who it is. In a window wider than 4:3 a race of one or two players draws to the window's edges, sky included, without the black border the game draws on a console (three or four players' quarters keep it), the title's and the menus' framed screens are enlarged to fill it, the transitions between screens cover all of it, and a race's HUD sits at the picture's sides (Graphics: Aspect Ratio Expand and HUD Placement 16:9 by default, Original for the console's 4:3 and its border). The game also plays in a browser, built from your ROM as a web page (docs/web.md).

The ROM

F-Zero X (USA), the first release (CFZE), as a big-endian .z64 of 16 MiB with SHA-1 5f658e88ffa9de23cba6986a8fd3d3a90d7b4340. Other regions, revisions and the 64DD's Expansion Kit are not supported.

Getting it

Releases for Windows (a zip: unzip it and run FZeroXRecompiled.exe from that folder) and Linux on x86-64 (a .tar.gz: extract it and run FZeroXRecompiled in that folder) are on the Releases page, without the ROM: pick yours with Load ROM. The Linux build needs glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or later), a Vulkan driver, and GTK 3 and FreeType, which desktop distributions have; it brings its own SDL2. Or build it as below.

Building

You need that ROM at roms/fzerox.us.z64. On Windows: LLVM's clang-cl, CMake 3.31 and Ninja, and a clang with a MIPS backend plus ld.lld for patches/. On Linux: clang lld libsdl2-dev libgtk-3-dev libfreetype-dev, CMake 3.31 and Ninja.

From the repo's root in a bash shell:

git submodule update --init --recursive
bash tools/recompile.sh -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl   # the game's code as C
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo \
      -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl \
      -DPATCHES_C_COMPILER=<MIPS clang> -DPATCHES_LD=<ld.lld>
ninja -C build FZeroXRecompiled

tools/recompile.sh builds N64Recomp from the submodule the first time, then translates the game. Run build/FZeroXRecompiled.exe from the repo's root, pick the ROM with Load ROM, then Start Game.

The symbols in syms/ are made from the decomp's own build of the game (tools/build_decomp.sh, which needs the ROM and Docker, then tools/gen_syms.sh). They only change when lib/fzerox moves.

A release is built by tools/release.sh: windows (Git Bash) and linux (Linux with Docker) build and pack its two archives into out/ from the same commit of main, and publish publishes them as the GitHub release v<version_string> (src/main/main.cpp) with releases/v<version>.md as its notes (the script's header says more).

License

GPL-3.0 (LICENSE), as the recompilations it follows. The decomp in lib/fzerox is its own project, under CC0.