IzunaRecomp

IzunaRecomp — The Izuna Project

Skip intro patch might be causing stutters, if you get them try disabling it.

More updates will be coming on Saturday. This got released with the purpose of people playing around with it and seeing what can be improved, so if you have an issue with it please talk about it and send your logs, this will help the project. I am but one person using the water eating slop machine to develop this and don't have all the hardware possible to test it, I've only used a 4060 and an AMD CPU to try it so far but it will be tested with an AMD GPU and on Linux soon.

A static recompilation of Ninja Gaiden II (Xbox 360, title 544307D5) for Windows, drawn natively by the Kasumi Renderer (Vulkan).

The game's PowerPC code is translated ahead of time into native x86-64, and its Direct3D calls are answered by the Kasumi Renderer, which draws every frame itself through Vulkan from the game's own shaders, recompiled for your GPU. There is no emulator in it: no GPU emulation, no interpreter, no JIT.

AI disclosure. The code, documents and tooling in this repository were written by an AI coding agent (Anthropic's Claude, through Claude Code), directed by the maintainer, who also tested every build on real hardware. Treat it like any other early-stage community project: expect bugs, read the code before relying on it, and report problems through issues.

IzunaRecomp started as a fork of Ninja's Dawn, the PC recompilation of Ninja Gaiden II, and grew into its own project: the emulated GPU was replaced by a native renderer, and the app, its settings, its menus and its mod support were rebuilt around it. Gameplay and game logic stay 1:1 with the Xbox 360 game.

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What you must bring

This project ships no game data of any kind — no textures, videos, sound, saves, DLC or executable image from the disc. You provide all of it from your own copy.

	What
1	Your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II for Xbox 360, extracted to a folder containing default.xex	Nothing works without it.
2	Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
3	A GPU with Vulkan — NVIDIA GTX 900 / AMD RX 400 / Intel Arc or newer, with an up-to-date driver

Nothing else needs installing (no Visual C++ Redistributable).

Getting started

1. Download IzunaRecomp-<version>-windows.zip from Releases and unzip it anywhere.
2. Run ng2.exe. The hub asks for your game folder (the one with default.xex); it is remembered.
3. START GAME.

The first start takes longer: IzunaRecomp reads the game's shaders from your copy and compiles them for your GPU (a progress bar shows how far along it is). They are kept in %LOCALAPPDATA%\IzunaRecomp\shaders, so later starts skip this.

ng2.exe is built for processors with AVX2 (Intel since 2013, every AMD Ryzen); ng2-compat.exe is the same game for older processors, and ng2.exe starts it by itself when needed. Keep both in the folder. The README.txt in the release has the controls and the settings in detail.

What's in it

• The Kasumi Renderer — native Vulkan rendering of the whole game, with the game's shaders recompiled from your copy at first start; any resolution (Auto: your screen's, or 720p to 2160p, each drawn at that true resolution), anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, output filters.
• Frame pacing — V-Sync Auto follows your monitor (60, 120, 144 Hz…, G-Sync / FreeSync), or locks the game's clock to 60 / 59.94 Hz; a Low input latency mode.
• A full app around the game — a hub with settings, an in-game menu (Esc / F10, or hold View / Share), performance readouts, saves import, DLC.
• Keyboard and controller — play with either or both; every key can be rebound; PlayStation or Xbox button prompts.
• Sound — full-level stereo with a limiter, the 5.1 mix's bass brought into stereo, and a cutscene audio fix that keeps sound in step with the picture.
• Mods — a Mods folder and a MODS page in the hub: replace the game's files (models, motions, effects, stages, text, sound banks), replace textures with pictures up to 2048 × 2048, hide draws by their shader, Lua script mods, and hooks on any of the game's functions. See docs/MODDING.md; examples are in examples/mods.
• Steadiness — threaded command recording, pipelines linked from per-shader parts, asynchronous file reads off the game's main thread, crash minidumps, and a Logging switch (Settings › Developer) that turns all logging off.

Known issues

• Parts of some models (Sonia's back) can be missing.
• Glass reflections and glows in places (the tower in chapter 1) look off.
• There's occasional hitches and stutters, these will be improved upon.
• Windows only for now. The tree also builds for the PS5, but that build is not released.

Report anything else through issues, with the logs folder from beside ng2.exe (the newest ng2_*.log, and a crash-*.dmp if there is one).

Building from source

See docs/BUILDING.md. In short: the ReXGlue SDK is fetched and patched by tools/setup_sdk.sh, the game's code is recompiled from your own default.xex (never committed — generated/ is reproducible from it), and the Windows build is cross-compiled from Linux with Clang against the headers and libraries of your own Build Tools for Visual Studio.

Credits

• Ninja's Dawn by TheSaltTrader — the PC recompilation IzunaRecomp forks.
• ReXGlue SDK by Tom Clay, derived from Xenia — the recompiler and runtime, as carried by the svr2011-ps5 project's rexglue-ps5 branch.
• XenosRecomp (hedge-dev), through goliathret's reeot-XenosRecomp fork — the shader recompiler behind the Kasumi Renderer's shader translation.
• Lua, Zstandard, smol-v, SDL, Dear ImGui, the Vulkan headers and Memory Allocator, DirectX Shader Compiler, and the Inter typeface — see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Licence

IzunaRecomp's own source is under the MIT licence (LICENSE), as is Ninja's Dawn, which it forks. Third-party components keep their own licences (THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md). No game material is covered by any of these licences or included in this repository; the executable in each release contains the game's code in translated form and is useful only with your own copy of the game.

Ninja Gaiden is a trademark of Koei Tecmo. IzunaRecomp is not affiliated with Koei Tecmo or Microsoft.