MC2Recomp

MC2Recomp

Midnight Club II (PS2, 2003) as a native Windows program, built with ps2-native-recomp from your own disc, with a launcher and a set of optional improvements: widescreen, 60 FPS, higher resolutions, upscaling, and more. The game's split-screen 2-player races work, with two controllers or with the keyboard and one controller.

Game	Disc	Serial
Midnight Club II	USA	SLUS-20209 (program CRC E5F2DF38)

This is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive or Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Play

You need your own disc image of Midnight Club II (USA) as an .iso. A .chd can be turned into one with MAME's chdman: chdman extractdvd -i "Midnight Club II.chd" -o "Midnight Club II.iso".

Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), a CPU with AVX2 and a Direct3D 12 graphics card.

1. Download the latest release zip from Releases and unzip it anywhere (or build it yourself, below).
2. Run MC2Recomp.exe. The cover art downloads in the background the first time.
3. Press Play. The first time, it asks for your disc image; the launcher remembers it (Settings > Disc Image changes it).
4. Settings has three tabs: Graphics, with the options below, P1 Controls and P2 Controls. Every option starts off, so a fresh install plays the game as it is on a PS2.

Options

• Fullscreen, Resolution (1x to 4x the PS2's), Vsync, Frame Pacing Fix (frames on an even 59.94 Hz clock)
• Picture Mode: how the picture is enlarged to the window: Crisp, Soft or Sharp, each with optional edge smoothing, or FSR (AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1)
• Texture Filtering: the game's own (Bilinear PS2), Nearest, or Bilinear (Forced)
• 60 FPS (the PCSX2 community patch by PeterDelta), with fixes for what it left at the wrong speed: the game speed after a crash and respawn, and the pedestrians' walk animation
• Widescreen 16:9 (the PCSX2 community patch by Arapapa), Fixed Widescreen HUD (the race HUD keeps its 4:3 shapes at the screen's edges), Menu/Movie Aspect Ratio (menus and videos in 4:3 while racing is 16:9)
• Color Settings: the PS2's 16-bit picture, or the game's full 32-bit picture; Dithering (the PS2's dither on the 16-bit picture)
• Smooth Distant Textures (less shimmer on far buildings; not something a PS2 does)
• Fix Distant Z-Fighting (not something a PS2 does): far away, the game's 16-bit depth buffer can't tell apart two surfaces that touch, such as the lit top of a distant elevated ramp and its dark face, under one depth step apart, so a row of dark teeth runs along the lit edge and moves as the camera does. With this on, the depth test also keeps the fraction of each depth, so the nearer surface wins every frame and the edge stays clean
• Skip Intro: straight to the menu, with the game's own developer switch

P1 Controls chooses what plays as player 1, Controller or Keyboard (with the mouse), and rebinds every PS2 button and each direction of both analog sticks for it. With Controller the keyboard does not work the game; with Keyboard the first controller connected is player 2. A controller row takes a button, a trigger or a stick direction; triggers and stick directions stay analog on a stick, so the right stick's up and down (the game's gas and brake) can go on the triggers. Choose a row, then press the new input. An input that another row had swaps with it. P2 Controls does the same for player 2's controller (a controller only: the keyboard always plays as player 1); it starts with the same bindings as player 1's controller. The bindings are kept in the game's keys.ini (player 2's lines start with pad2_).

Two players

The game's split-screen 2-player races work. Choose player 1's device in Settings > P1 Controls > Device: with Keyboard, one controller is enough (it is player 2); with Controller, connect two (the first one connected is player 1, the second player 2). In the game, go to Arcade Mode, move down to Players and set it to 2, then start the race. Each player's car, rumble and controls are their own, and the widescreen, Fixed Widescreen HUD and 60 FPS options work in both halves of the screen.

Build

On Windows, with Git for Windows (Git Bash), CMake, Ninja, Python 3 and llvm-mingw (UCRT). The toolkit's scripts\bootstrap.ps1 installs them with winget; no Visual Studio is needed.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/jcoker85/MC2Recomp.git
cd MC2Recomp
bash tools/build.sh "/c/Games/Midnight Club II (USA).iso"

tools/build.sh:

1. fetches ps2-native-recomp v0.0.4 (the submodule) and applies patches/ps2-native-recomp.patch;
2. sets up the toolkit's build tools;
3. translates the game's code from your disc into C++ and builds the game program (ps2run.exe), with the patches in mc2-options/;
4. builds the launcher, MC2Recomp.exe.

The first build takes a while. Code the first build did not see is translated while you play and kept for next time.

What is and is not in this repository

The repository holds the launcher, patches, build files and documentation. It does not contain disc images, the game's program, game assets, cover art, the launcher's icon artwork or recompiled game code. The recompiled C++ and the game program are generated on your machine from your own disc and stay in ps2-native-recomp/generated and ps2-native-recomp/games, which git ignores. When the game runs, it reads its data from your disc image.

Release zips contain the built programs: the launcher and the game program, which includes a machine-translated build of the game's own code. They contain no disc data, game assets, cover art or the launcher's icon (credited below), which the launcher downloads on its first start. tools/package_release.sh makes one from a finished build. Cover art is downloaded at run time from libretro-thumbnails and is not redistributed here.

• hub/: the launcher (hub.c, ported from the TwistedMetal1234Recomp menu) and its build files. It has no icon built in: on its first start it downloads its icon into covers/icon.ico, beside the box art, and its window and the game window show it from there (a square PNG put at covers/icon.png is used instead). It also writes the icon into its own MC2Recomp.exe (it renames itself to MC2Recomp.exe.old and puts a copy with the icon in its place), so Explorer and shortcuts show it from the next start; the release zip's launcher has none.
• mc2-options/:
  • toggles.txt: the PCSX2 community patches (Widescreen 16:9 by Arapapa, 60 FPS by PeterDelta) as instructions that switch at run time, plus this project's fix for the speed after a respawn.
  • hud43.py / hud43.pnach: the code behind Fixed Widescreen HUD.
  • peds60.py / peds60.pnach: the pedestrian animation speed fix at 60 FPS.
  • menus43.txt: the game state that tells a race from a menu, for Menu/Movie Aspect Ratio.
• patches/ps2-native-recomp.patch: this project's changes to the toolkit: the MC2 HUD hooks and fixes the game needed to run, dithering, texture filtering, smooth distant textures, FSR, the 4:3 menus switch, and faster texture uploads (drawing runs keep going over texture uploads, from MC1Recomp; PS2_RENAME=0 turns that off, for comparison), and Fix Distant Z-Fighting (PS2_DEPTH_FRAC=1, from SR1Recomp): 16-bit depth keeps 8 bits of its fraction in a second region after the emulated memory (the buffer is twice as large when it is on), tagged with the low 8 bits of the depth it belongs to, so a depth written another way (an upload, a copy) counts as having none, as on the PS2.
• ps2-native-recomp/: the toolkit, as a git submodule.
• tools/: the build script and the release packaging script.

Credits

• ps2-native-recomp by Samir Nuri and exoteric33 (MIT): the recompiler and runtime this project is built on.
• The PCSX2 community patches (from PCSX2/pcsx2_patches): Widescreen 16:9 by Arapapa, 60 FPS by PeterDelta.
• AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 (MIT, Copyright (c) 2021 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.): the FSR picture mode is written after AMD's published shaders.
• Box art in the launcher: libretro-thumbnails.
• The launcher and game window icon: Midnight Club II icon by RAZELIGHT on SteamGridDB, downloaded by the launcher on its first start.

License

MIT; see LICENSE. ps2-native-recomp is MIT as well.

Midnight Club is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., and the game is copyright its owners. This repository contains none of its code, data or artwork, nor the icon and box art the launcher downloads.

AI disclosure

This project was built with Claude (Anthropic) working as a coding assistant under the direction of the author.

• Claude did: wrote most of the code in this repository: the launcher, the changes to the toolkit, and the HUD, pedestrian and respawn patches. It also traced the game's code to find the addresses those patches use, and drafted this README.
• Claude did not: write ps2-native-recomp, which is another project used here as a submodule, the PCSX2 community patches, or the game itself, whose code the recompiler translates from your own disc. It did not decide what the project should be or when something was right: the author set the goals, played and tested every change, and chose what shipped.