MediEvil (PS4) for PC

MediEvil (PS4) for PC

A PC port of MediEvil (PlayStation 4, 2019, CUSA11227; the European CUSA12982 works too) for Windows 10 and 11 and the Steam Deck (Linux), built on the God of War III PC port.

The CPU side is native: the game's original x86-64 executable runs directly on the PC's processor and a runtime written for this port replaces the PS4 system libraries, so there is no CPU emulator. The graphics run on the shadPS4 video core, which emulates the PS4 GPU at a high level: it recompiles the game's shaders and translates its GPU commands to Vulkan.

Roadmap

What this fork has done, and what is next. Checked items are in a release or on the default branch.

Performance and fixes

• Menus work at 4K; the game boots at any output size
• Output resolution and render scale as separate settings; live render scale (50-200%)
• Unreal's HZB occlusion culling works; the hidden decal prepass is skipped
• Fights: most render pass breaks gone (120 FPS cap: 1% / 0.1% lows 119.7 / 117.4)
• Memory sync and draw-translation CPU cuts; no stalls when Windows trims memory
• Frame pacing above 60 FPS: Reflex limiter, automatic frame limit, precise vblank tick
• Shadow black boxes, a draw-pipe crash / freeze and vanishing GPU particles fixed
• Finer occlusion culling at small resolutions
• Hilltop Mausoleum lighting fixed on Linux / Steam Deck
• Wrong lighting / white or teal walls / purple reflections (Hall of Heroes, Hilltop Mausoleum): the sky light's brightness is now read correctly at each level load
• Hang at "quit to main menu" (found: a deadlock between two GPU threads)
• Occasional crash at startup (S1; restarting works)

Game and platforms

• Upstream 1.3.8 merged
• Game update 01.02 supported
• Steam Deck / Linux: native AppImage
• Deck Optimized preset (detects the Deck, 60 FPS in the heaviest view)
• Deck: steadier frame times at the 60 FPS cap
• Deck: freeze after quitting from Steam

Graphics

• Graphics quality levels (Ultra to Low, Deck Optimized) with 18 individual settings, Console = the PS4's values
• Real Unreal motion vectors and camera-cut detection for temporal upscalers
• NVIDIA DLAA (render scale 100) in place of the game's anti-aliasing
• NVIDIA DLSS upscaling below 100 (Quality / Balanced / Performance)
• DLSS in the launcher and the in-game menu, F9 in game
• DLSS model (preset) per quality mode
• AMD FSR 3 upscaling on the same inputs
• DLSS frame generation
• FSR frame generation

Launcher and controls

• New icon, Start menu shortcut, updates from this fork
• Mouse cursor hidden while playing
• Xbox and keyboard button prompts in the game, following your remaps; keys set by pressing them
• Mouse look and menu mouse, camera options

What's new in 2.2.1

• Windows build fix. 2.2.0's MediEvil.exe (and the 2.1 releases') was built with an old Python 3.8 by mistake: mods that replace game files failed to start, and with Xbox / Keyboard prompts the inventory's and tutorials' button pictures stayed PlayStation. It is now built with Python 3.14. The Linux / Deck AppImage was not affected.

What's new in 2.2.0

• Xbox and keyboard button prompts. Launcher > Controls > In-game button prompts: PlayStation (the game's own), Xbox or Keyboard. The game's HUD, menus, inventory, bestiary and Button Layout page show the button or key you play with, including your remaps (Cross on B shows B; Cross on Q shows Q). The icons are Julio Cacko's Free Input Prompts (CC0). "Gamepad names" is now Controller type.
• Key capture. To remap a key, click its box on the Controls page and press the key: no more typing "Left Shift". Left and right Shift / Ctrl / Alt are told apart.
• A new Load list, in the game's own menu style:
  • Continue loads your newest save; every save shows its Slot number.
  • Beside the list: the level's loading screen, chalices, levels completed, life bottles, gold, bestiary entries and play time. Square / Tab lists every level in the save.
  • The names, pictures and fonts come from your own copy of the game at start; nothing of the game is shipped.
• Saves stay in their slot. Loading an older slot and playing on used to save into a different slot. A save's date is now its last write, so the game saves where you loaded. Save backups made at each start are no longer deleted (they are small).
• Dan's Crypt water at effects resolution below 100% looked wrong (and the map screen had glitches): fixed.

What's new in 2.1.1

• Lighting fix. Walls that sometimes came up flooded with light after a level load (teal in the Hall of Heroes, white on 01.00, purple reflections) are fixed. Each level load, the game reads one small value back from the GPU, the sky light's average brightness; the port used to hand it leftover memory instead. Levels now also look as intended on good loads: darker corners, less washed out.
• Developer cheat menu on 01.02. It opens with L1 + R1 + R3 in a level (01.00: R3). The update added that combo; the port's earlier attempts to free up R3 are gone, so R3 still recenters the camera.
• Steam Deck build attached to the release: MediEvil-x86_64.AppImage.

What's new in 2.1.0

• NVIDIA DLSS (RTX cards). It replaces the game's own anti-aliasing:
  • DLAA at render scale 100;
  • upscaling below 100. At 50% (Performance) the picture looks close to native at a much higher frame rate.
  • Turn it on in the launcher (Graphics > NVIDIA DLSS), in the game's menu (Image tab), or with F9 while playing. It is off by default.
  • NVIDIA's nvngx_dlss.dll is not included: copy it into the bin folder (README-Windows.txt).
• Graphics quality levels. Ultra, High, Console, Medium and Low each set 18 individual settings, five of them new. Change any one and the level shows Custom. Console uses the PS4's exact values, shadows included.
• Steam Deck and Linux.
  • The Linux build works again and runs natively on the Deck as an AppImage.
  • A Deck Optimized preset holds 60 FPS in the heaviest graveyard view.
  • Finer occlusion culling at small resolutions.
  • Less CPU work per frame, which leaves the Deck's 15 W power budget to the GPU.
  • See packaging/linux/README-Linux.md.
• Fixes.
  • Hilltop Mausoleum lighting on Linux, and on Windows the same kind of fix (reused memory is cleared before it changes hands) against wrong lighting and purple reflections.
  • The torch and crypt-floor glitch with the single particle pass.
  • The in-game menu no longer adds frames while it is open.
  • A crash during memory copies on Linux.
  • Launcher settings carry over correctly between quality levels.
  • The mouse cursor hides while playing.
• Live render scale from 50% to 200% in the in-game menu.

This fork

This is BevelTipDrip's fork of bc160201983's MediEvil port, actively maintained. It contains everything up to upstream 1.3.8, plus performance and correctness work, each change measured in game. Its releases start at 2.0.0, and the launcher checks this fork for updates, so it never offers upstream's builds in place of this one.

What 2.0.0 changed, in short:

• Fights: kill effects nearly doubled the render passes in a frame (326 to 560–660), each break costing the draw-translation thread time, so it saturated; most of those breaks are gone (Performance patches > "Fewer render pass breaks"). A fight at a 120 FPS cap holds 1% / 0.1% lows of 119.7 / 117.4 FPS, with no frame over 10 ms.
• Culling: Unreal's HZB occlusion culling works (its small mip levels were never rendered), through a runtime remap with no GPU wait. The decal depth prepass, about 600 draws a frame for decals nobody sees, is skipped.
• Memory sync: CPU writes into memory the GPU wrote no longer force downloads (27 a second to 0); the 2–5 s stalls when Windows trimmed the game's memory are gone; lock and memory-pool lookups are cheaper (+17% median FPS in the heaviest view); small buffers live in VRAM.
• Draw translation: less CPU work per draw (texture-set memo, word-wise register scans, deferred fences, bulk descriptor copies, sampler memo).
• Correctness: shadows drawn as black boxes (stencil writes by shaders) fixed; a crash and freeze in the draw pipe fixed; dust and other GPU particles no longer vanish with the camera angle ("GPU particle bounds" game patch).
• Frame pacing (above 60 FPS): NVIDIA Reflex limiter, an automatic frame limit at half the refresh (one below it with VRR), and presents on a precise vblank tick.
• Game update 01.02 (CUSA11227) with every hook the port uses mapped.

Every optimisation is a switch (launcher > Performance > Performance patches, or a GOW3_* variable), so each one can be compared on and off.

For other ports

Ports with the same lineage (shadPS4 video core → the Bloodborne PC port → the God of War III PC port → this port) are welcome to take any of this, under the same license (GPL v2 or later; keep the copyright headers and credit the source). Where to start:

• research/docs/fix-inventory.md: every fix with its evidence, commits, files, switch, and whether it is general, depends on how MediEvil behaves, or is MediEvil-only.
• research/docs/gpu-threading-reference.md: how the GPU threads, waits and memory sync fit together, and the rules learned the hard way.
• research/docs/START-HERE.md: the index of the research docs (plans, tests and measurements).
• Commit messages name the test (T-…) that measured each change. In the video core, changes from shadPS4 are marked with gow3: comments (gpu/VENDOR.txt).

Pointing an LLM at this repo works well: the docs above are written to be read that way.

No game files are included. You need your own copy of MediEvil (CUSA11227), as an unpacked folder or a fake package (.pkg). This project is not affiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment or Other Ocean. MediEvil is a trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Screenshots

Captured on Windows 11 (RTX 5080) with this port.

What works

• Boot, intro movies, menus and gameplay (tested on an RTX 5080, a 1080p 200 Hz monitor and a 4K TV).
• Intel and AMD CPUs: the game's few AMD-only SSE4a instructions (INSERTQ) are replaced with SSE2 code on CPUs without them (all Intel CPUs), and any other one is emulated.
• 60 FPS by default; above 60 is experimental: Engine frame rate 120 or 240 (launcher > Performance, or the in-game menu) lifts the PS4 game's 60 FPS cap, but can stutter and needs a fast CPU; settings from before 1.3.4 go back to 60 once. The cap is Unreal Engine 4's console frame-rate ceiling (SmoothedFrameRateRange, applied with VSync on), raised by the config override pak; game speed stays normal. Frames are shown as soon as they are ready (a 480 Hz virtual vblank with a frame limit), so pacing stays even. An RTX 5080 runs menus at 120 and levels at about 90 to 120 FPS.
• Smooth frame pacing on any monitor: Frame rate limit "Half display refresh (smoothest)" shows every frame for exactly two refreshes (72 FPS on 144 Hz, 100 FPS on 200 Hz; with Engine frame rate 120). 60 FPS on a 144/165 Hz screen cannot be shown evenly and looks like stutter. With VSync on, a limit at the display's own refresh (60 on a 60 Hz TV) is left to VSync, which paces it.
• Audio (Wwise through AudioOut, ATRAC9 and AAC). On stereo speakers and headphones the port mixes the game's 7.1 output down itself (SDL's downmix played it about 13 dB too quietly).
• Controller (DualSense, Xbox and others, through SDL3) and keyboard, both remappable. Every connected controller is read, also while another window has the focus, and the log names each one. Controls > Controller type (PlayStation / Xbox) labels the launcher's buttons; Controls > In-game button prompts (PlayStation / Xbox / Keyboard) changes the game's own prompts and the Load list's, showing your remapped buttons and keys (Xbox and keyboard icons: Julio Cacko's Free Input Prompts, CC0, third_party/input-prompts). Controls > Stick range (90% to 70%) counts less tilt as a full push, for sticks that never reach the edge (some hall-effect pads).
• Saving and loading; save backups before every start.
• All the game's languages (launcher > Game > Language): every PS4 system language can be picked, Polish included, whatever region your copy is from (a language the game has no text for shows English).
• Voice language (launcher > Game > Voice language): the spoken language can differ from the text. The game has 15 dubs (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Czech, Greek, Arabic, Japanese), for example Japanese voices with English text. "Same as game language" keeps the game's own choice.
• Screenshots: F12 in the game saves a PNG of the game's picture at its full resolution (3840 × 2160 in native 4K) in user/screenshots (launcher > Display > Open screenshots folder). Shift+F12 saves raw frames for bug reports.
• Update notice: the launcher asks GitHub for a newer release when it opens and offers to download and install it (Advanced > Check for updates; can be switched off).
• Install from PKG: the launcher (or run.py) unpacks a fake PKG once, resumably.
• Any output resolution (launcher > Output resolution: 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 1800p, 4K, your display's size, or any output_resolution=WxH in medievil.ini): the game starts at that size, as a PS4 starts at its TV's (built-in patch "Boot display size", patches/MediEvil.xml), so the menus and controller navigation work at every size. In windowed mode the window opens at it. Above 1080p the port also uses a larger PS4 framebuffer pool ("Native 4K framebuffer pool (512 MB)") and more game memory, by itself.
• Render scale (launcher > Render scale, 50% to 200%): above 100% the 3D scene is drawn larger and scaled down to the output (supersampling, sharpest); below 100% the game's own UE4 temporal upsampling draws it smaller and rebuilds the full picture from its motion vectors (faster). The menus and HUD stay at the output size (a UE4 config override pak, scripts/ue4_override.py). The in-game menu (Performance > Game resolution now) can still switch between 1080p, 1440p, 1800p and 4K live, for the developer debug menu.
• Anti-aliasing (launcher > Performance > Anti-aliasing): the game's temporal AA (default, smooth), FXAA (sharper) or Off (raw pixels, best with a high render resolution). A render scale below 100% always uses temporal AA.
• Graphics quality: Low (integrated graphics such as the Radeon 780M), Medium, Console (PS4), High and Ultra (sharper, longer-range shadows, better reflections and more distant detail). Every preset keeps point/spot light shadows at one fixed size, which stops the shadow flicker while moving, and limits shadow draws so busy outdoor scenes stay near 60 FPS.
• Launcher in MediEvil's style: Gallowmere's colors and the game's own fonts (read from your copy of the game, never shipped), with home and cover art, display, performance, game folder / PKG install / save backups, cheats, patches, mods, controls, diagnostics and log.
• In-game menu (Insert, or R3+L2): image (display mode, VSync, FSR 1, sharpening), performance and the performance overlay.
• Online features (PSN) answer as a console that is not signed in.

Cheats (launcher > Game > Cheats)

• Developer cheat menu: MediEvil's own debug menu, left in the game by its developers and switched on by the override pak. Press R3 in a level (01.02: hold L1 + R1, then press R3): unlock all levels, level select, complete level, unlock all weapons, invincibility, all runes and quest items, life bottles, gold, chalices, fly mode and more. Its 60 FPS lock is removed. Enemies pause while the menu is open (the developers' design) and carry on when it closes, however it is closed (Complete Level and other level changes included).
• Unlimited ammo: daggers, crossbow and longbow bolts, lightning and the other weapons never run out (weapons and shields also stop wearing out).

Performance work in this port

• Fewer hitches (from the Uncharted port): a 1 ms Windows timer, no power throttling of the game's threads, a spare GPU memory block per memory type (new textures no longer wait for the driver), pageable video memory where the driver offers it, merged buffer barrier ranges and lighter thread wake-ups. On 4 CPU cores the worst gameplay frame went from 31-32 ms to 18 ms and a busy scene from 33 to 54 FPS (measured twice). Each can be switched off for tests (GOW3_TIMER_RES=0, GOW3_POWER_THROTTLE=1, GOW3_SPARE_IMAGE_BLOCK=0, GOW3_PAGEABLE_MEMORY=0, GOW3_TRACKER_MERGE_GAP=0, GOW3_FUTEX_COND=0).

• GPU barriers are recorded at most 128 images per call (very large batches are what older AMD drivers crash on).

• No more texture churn: the game draws its lighting volumes and colour grading LUT (3D textures) as 2D slices; each switch rebuilt and copied the texture, about 14 times per frame. The 3D texture now serves the slices through a 2D array view (~4,700 texture rebuilds per 5 s down to ~90).

• 8 GB graphics cards (laptops): the texture garbage collector's limits now follow the driver's memory budget (from the Uncharted port). The old rule evicted textures still in use on 8 GB cards and loaded them again (746 evictions in a test route; now none).

• Texture cache images share VMA memory blocks instead of one driver allocation each (Unreal Engine 4 reuses render target memory every frame): 22% of the draw recording thread was spent creating and freeing GPU memory.

• A sampling profiler for the GPU threads: GOW3_SAMPLE_FILE=<prefix> and scripts/symbolize_samples.py.

Known limits

• Above 60 FPS, the busiest levels are limited by the port's GPU command translation (one thread).
• "Game resolution now" (in-game menu) works with Native and the native output modes; with the 1440p / 1800p / 4K render resolutions (supersampling) it stays at 1080p, as a larger output on top runs out of the game's PS4 memory.
• With a native output above 1080p (1440p / 1800p / 4K native output) the gamepad cannot reach menu items outside the top-left 1920×1080 area (pause menu "Quit to Map", the debug menu's right column): the game's UI window stays at 1080p while the picture switches. "4K (sharpest)" renders the 3D scene at 4K with working menus; or switch to 1080p (in-game menu > Performance) and back.
• Both MediEvil versions are supported: 01.00 (the base game) and 01.02 (the update), for CUSA11227 and CUSA12982. The built-in patches have addresses for each version and are chosen by the game's APP_VER and the eboot.bin hash (such as the 4K framebuffer pool); cheat edits that do not match the installed version are skipped (the log says which). Native output (1440p / 1800p / 4K native output) finds the game's resolution setting in each version's own code (tested on 01.00; the 01.02 address was found by @Porticus in #29). If a game build doesn't have that code, native out