God of War: Betrayal Remastered

God of War: Betrayal Remastered

A native Windows port of God of War: Betrayal, the 2007 side-scrolling God of War made for J2ME (mobile Java) phones. It is rebuilt from the original game's own decompiled code, not emulated, and adds widescreen, high frame rates and modern controls.

Status: complete. The game is finished, released as the stable 1.0.0, and has been played from start to finish. The project is no longer in active development, though new features may still arrive as occasional updates, and the launcher will pick those up automatically.

Original	Launcher	You supply
Sony Ericsson K800i build, 240x320, MIDlet 1.4.20	GodOfWar.exe	God-of-War-Betrayal_K800i_v1420.jar (any copy of that build)

Download and play

The game is not included. It belongs to its rights holders, so you need your own copy of the K800i .jar. Other versions of the game are not supported, and the launcher tells you if you pick one.

1. Download the zip from the Releases page and unzip it anywhere.
2. Run GodOfWar.exe and click Choose file... to pick your .jar. The launcher unpacks it for you.
3. Choose Fullscreen or Windowed and press Play.

There is no installer, and no Visual C++ redistributable is needed. The launcher checks GitHub for newer builds on start-up, offers an Update button when there is one, and keeps your saves.

What the port adds

Widescreen	Original, Auto, 4:3, 16:10, 16:9, 21:9
Frame rate	Original, 60, 90, 120, 144, 165, 240, Unlimited, with interpolated frames
Game speed	Stays at the original 25 logic steps a second
Fullscreen	Borderless by default; F11 or Alt+Enter toggles it
Controls	Keyboard and XInput gamepad

Widescreen shows more of the level and never stretches sprites or the HUD. The options are in Main menu > Options and in the pause menu. The zip's README.txt covers the controls.

Troubleshooting

The music and sound effects are MIDI, played through the Windows synthesizer, so they sound different from an emulator or the phone; that is expected. Sound problems are logged to %LOCALAPPDATA%\gow-betrayal-port\audio.log.

Game files stay in data\ next to the launcher. Saves and display settings live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\gow-betrayal-port\. To uninstall, delete the game's folder, and delete that one too if you want to remove your saves.

How it was made

The game is plain JVM bytecode with minifier-style obfuscation, so Vineflower recovers close-to-original Java directly. From there the code was read through and renamed, and the game's custom binary formats (resource banks, sprite atlases, animation sets, bit-packed levels) were parsed and verified byte for byte.

The port is translated mechanically: tools/java2cpp.py turns the renamed Java into C++, and a hand-written engine and platform layer sit underneath. Patches for widescreen, settings and interpolation are applied during translation (tools/gow_port_patches.py), so the renamed Java stays a plain decompile. It is C++17 on raw Win32 and GDI, with no SDL, Direct3D or OpenGL.

The project started on the generic v1.4.8 jar and moved to the Sony Ericsson K800i build, which has larger 22 px tiles, a parallax background in every level, better art and all eleven MIDI tracks in use.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
betrayal/decompiled/	Raw Vineflower output
betrayal/src/	Renamed, compile-checked Java (generated from names.map)
betrayal/docs/	Roadmaps, class map, asset formats and names.map
betrayal/port/	The C++ port, launcher and packaging scripts
tools/	Extraction, decompilation, renaming, parsing and translation scripts
roms/, betrayal/extracted/	Your original jar and its contents (gitignored, never commit)

Documentation

Topic	File
Reverse-engineering record	ROADMAP
Port development log	PORT_ROADMAP
Classes and members	CLASS_MAP
Binary formats	ASSET_FORMATS
Store page copy	ITCH_PAGE

The scripts are described in tools/README.md.

Building from source

You need Windows, Visual Studio or the VS Build Tools with the C++ workload, CMake and Ninja. Regenerating sources also needs Python 3.10+ (pip install javalang) and a Java 17+ JDK (see tools/README.md).

python tools\extract_jar.py          & rem unpack your jar from roms\
python tools\decompile.py
python tools\rename_gow.py           & rem renamed Java -> betrayal\src + compile check
python tools\java2cpp.py             & rem -> betrayal\port\src\gen
betrayal\port\build.bat              & rem builds betrayal\port\build\gow_port.exe

To build the same package that gets released, run betrayal\port\build_dist.bat <version> and then betrayal\port\check_dist.ps1, which confirms that no game data or VC runtime slipped in. The output is in betrayal\port\dist\.

Releases and self-update

Pushing a tag such as gow-v1.2.3 runs the release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml), which builds, checks and publishes the zip. The tag sets the version, and any 0.x or suffixed version is marked as a pre-release.

The launcher finds updates by listing this repository's releases and taking the newest gow-v tag that has a .zip attached. Keeping updates working for people who already have the game means:

• Do not rename or move the repository. The owner and repository name (samioan/gow-betrayal-remastered) are compiled into every released launcher.
• Keep the gow-v tag prefix, and keep a .zip on each release.

Legal

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Santa Monica Studio, Glu Mobile, Metaflow, or the game's original developers and publishers. God of War is a trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC. See NOTICE.md for attribution and third-party licences.