lost-paradise-native

lost-paradise-native

Runs Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (PS4, CUSA12776 or CUSA12781) natively on Linux and Windows. A C++ host loads the game's original x86-64 code, answers its PS4 system calls itself, and recompiles its GPU shaders to Vulkan.

Did all my testing on CachyOS and Windows 11. PC Specs: 4070 ti SUPER i7 12700k 32GB RAM

No game code or data is included. You need your own dump.

The game boots, reaches the menus and plays. See docs/STATUS.md for progress and known issues.

Features

• Display modes: windowed, borderless fullscreen or fullscreen.
• Resolutions: 720p, 896p (PS4), 1080p (PS4 Pro) and native 1440p output.
• Aspect ratio: 16:9, 16:10 or 21:9. The game renders at that shape (2560x1080 for 1080p at 21:9) with its 3D view widened to match (same vertical field of view, so 21:9 shows more to the sides and 16:10 a little less), and the HUD stays 16:9 in the middle. Not stretched.
• Frame rate: cap at 30, 60 or 90 fps, or uncapped, with the game still running at normal speed. The title screen, menus and real-time cutscenes go uncapped too. Optional FPS counter.
• DLAA: NVIDIA DLSS anti-aliasing in place of the game's SMAA (RTX cards, see Build).
• PC Settings: these options from the F11 menu, from a PC SETTINGS entry in the title and pause menus, or from the launcher.
• Launcher: an AppImage with Play, Settings, Skip intro logos and a .pkg unpacker.
• Sharper image: full texture mipmaps, anisotropic filtering and smooth scaling to the window.
• Performance: draws recorded on several threads, shader analysis ahead of the frame, and a pipeline cache that removes stutter on later runs.
• Faster save loading: loading screens run as fast as they draw.
• Save/load menu: pick a slot to save, load, overwrite or delete, with icon, chapter, date, play time and controller button hints.
• Sound and controllers through SDL.

Build

Needs CMake, Ninja, a C++20 compiler, and the Vulkan, glslang, zlib and SDL2 development packages (without SDL2 there is no window).

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja
ninja -C build
scripts/fetch-nids.sh aerolib.csv     # import names, needed to run

Optional, for NVIDIA DLSS: run scripts/fetch-dlss.sh, then the two build commands again.

Windows (experimental)

Each push builds a Windows zip: open the commit's Windows workflow run on GitHub and download Lost_Paradise-windows under Artifacts. Unzip it, put the dump in the game folder next to Lost Paradise.exe (the launcher makes the folder on its first start) and press Play; the game's log goes to play.log in that folder. Releases carry the same zip. Needs Windows 10 1803 or later and a Vulkan driver. DLSS is Linux only for now.

To build it yourself, in an MSYS2 UCRT64 shell:

pacman -S --needed zip mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-{gcc,cmake,ninja,SDL2,vulkan-headers,vulkan-loader,glslang,zlib}
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja && ninja -C build
scripts/fetch-nids.sh aerolib.csv
scripts/make-windows-zip.sh           # build/Lost_Paradise-windows.zip

Or cross-compile from Linux with MinGW-w64: cmake/mingw-w64-x86_64.cmake is the toolchain file. How the port works: the game's code calls ours through System V thunks (src/host/guest_abi.h), guest memory is built on placeholders (src/host/mman_win.cpp), and the thread pointer is a TEB slot read through %gs (src/host/tls.cpp).

Run

Lay out an install folder like this, with the dump (the folder with eboot.bin and sce_module/) inside a game folder:

Lost Paradise/
  game/CUSA12776/          the dump
  lost-paradise/           this repo, built
  launch.sh                or Lost_Paradise-x86_64.AppImage

Saves go to lpn-data/savedata/<title ID> (one folder per version, e.g. CUSA12776, read from the dump's sce_sys/param.sfo), the PC settings to lpn-display.ini and the log to play.log, all in that folder. Saves from before the split are moved into lpn-data/savedata/CUSA12776 on the first run. lpn-host looks for the game in game/ of the folder it runs in, or takes its path first:

build/src/host/lpn-host /path/to/CUSA12776 --nids aerolib.csv

--data DIR changes the save folder; lpn-host with no arguments lists every option.

Mods

Put mods in a mods folder in the install folder (the launcher makes it). Each folder in mods is one mod, laid out like the game folder; its files are opened instead of the game's:

Lost Paradise/
  mods/
    Red Kenshiro/data/2dpar/sprite_e.par     replaces game/CUSA12776/data/2dpar/sprite_e.par
    HD Buttons/data/2dpar/ui_e.par/2d_jm_btn.dds
                                             replaces only 2d_jm_btn.dds inside ui_e.par
    20-HD Desert/data/stage/...
    _Old Mod/...                             off: the name starts with _ (or .)

A folder named like an archive (ui_e.par/) holds files to change inside that archive, by their path in it, so a mod needs only the textures it changes. Archives inside archives work the same way (ui_e.par/inner.par/x.dds). The changed copy is made at the first start and kept in lpn-data/mod-archives, and made again when a mod's files change. Only files already in an archive can be changed; the log names any that are not there.

Files laid out right in mods (mods/data/...) work too. When two mods replace the same file, the one whose folder name sorts last wins, so number them to set the order; mods that change different files inside one archive both apply. The log lists the mods found at start, and --trace-files names the mod each file came from; --no-mods plays without them and --mods DIR reads another folder.

Launcher

scripts/make-appimage.sh "<install folder>" packs the launcher, lpn-host and aerolib.csv into Lost_Paradise-x86_64.AppImage (it downloads appimagetool the first time) and copies it there. The launcher has Play, Settings (the in-game PC Settings: the same lpn-display.ini, so a change in one shows in the other) and a Skip intro logos box, which runs the boot as fast as it draws until the title screen.

Check for updates (top right) asks GitHub for the latest release. From the AppImage, a newer one is downloaded over it and started; a build from source is told to pull and rebuild.

The gear (bottom right) opens Tools:

• Unpack a .pkg extracts a PS4 package into the game folder as game/<title ID>. Pick it with the desktop's file chooser or drop it on the window.
• Apply an update or DLC, from a .pkg or from a folder that is already unpacked, adds it to the game with the same title ID. An update makes a new version, game/<title ID>-v<version>: a copy of the game made of hard links (no extra room for the files the update leaves alone) with the update's files over it, so the game as it was stays too. DLC goes into game/<title ID>-DLC/<label> (lpn-host does not load DLC yet).

With more than one version in game/, Play asks which one to start.

launch.sh

A launch.sh in the install folder keeps it to one command and writes the log to play.log:

#!/bin/sh
cd "$(dirname "$0")" || exit 1
exec lost-paradise/build/src/host/lpn-host --nids lost-paradise/aerolib.csv --data lpn-data "$@" 2> play.log

In the game window, F11 opens the display menu (window mode, resolution, FPS cap) and F12 saves a debug capture to lpn-captures/.

Tuning

Defaults suit most machines. These environment variables override them:

Variable	Default	Effect
LPN_RECORD_THREADS	6 on 16+ hardware threads, else 0	Threads that record draws in parallel. 0 turns them off.
LPN_ANALYSIS_WORKERS	6 on 16+ threads, 3 on 8+, else 1	Threads that analyse shaders and draws.
LPN_PROFILE=1	off	Prints per-frame timings.
LPN_HUD_STRETCH=1	off	With a 16:10 or 21:9 aspect ratio, stretch the HUD over the whole picture instead of keeping it 16:9.
LPN_HUD_LOG=1	off	Logs which draws are treated as HUD ([hud] lines), for reporting HUD problems.

Example: LPN_RECORD_THREADS=0 ./launch.sh

Tools

Command-line tools for studying the game files, built with the rest:

Tool	Does
lpn-par	Lists and extracts .par archives (--recursive for nested ones)
lpn-gmd	Reads GMD models and exports OBJ, optionally posed by an animation
lpn-gmt	Reads GMT skeletal animations
lpn-inspect	Names the eboot's imports and finds function starts for Ghidra
lpn-gcn	Disassembles GCN shaders

build/tools/par/lpn-par extract CUSA12776/data/chara/ps4/adv/c_ca_ken/mesh.par out/mesh
build/tools/gmd/lpn-gmd obj out/mesh/c_ca_ken.gmd out/mesh/ken.obj

File formats are written up in docs/formats.md, and Ghidra import scripts are in ghidra/. Run the tests with ctest --test-dir build.

Layout

• src/host/: the host (lpn-host): loader, system calls, Vulkan renderer
• src/gcn/: GCN shader decoding and translation to SPIR-V
• src/ps4elf/: PS4 ELF and dynamic linking
• src/formats/: game file formats (PARC, SLLZ, GMD, GMT)
• tools/: the command-line tools
• tests/: unit tests
• docs/: findings about the game and how the host works

License

MIT, see LICENSE. This covers the code in this repository only, not the game, which you must own.

Third-party code and art keep their own licenses:

• external/stb: MIT or public domain (external/stb/LICENSE).
• external/nanosvg: zlib (notice at the top of each header).
• external/controllerimage: button art is public domain, see its DATA-LICENSE.txt and credits.txt.
• NVIDIA DLSS SDK (optional, fetched by scripts/fetch-dlss.sh, not in this repository): NVIDIA RTX SDKs license. Release builds that bundle the DLSS runtime are subject to it.
• aerolib.csv (fetched by scripts/fetch-nids.sh, not in this repository): from zecoxao/sce_symbols.

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sega, Sony or NVIDIA.