Pac-Man Championship Edition (2007): native PC port

Pac-Man Championship Edition: native PC port

A native Windows build of Pac-Man Championship Edition (Xbox 360 Live Arcade, 2007), made by statically recompiling the game's PowerPC code to x86-64 with the ReXGlue SDK (built on Xenia's kernel, GPU and audio emulation). It is a hobby project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Bandai Namco or Microsoft.

No game files are included. You need your own copy of the game, dumped from your own Xbox 360.

Features

• Random mazes: a bonus mode for Championship Mode. Press R3 on the title screen; the logo turns red and each game plays the mazes in a new random order (high scores aren't recorded for those games).
• The whole maze, at last: the original draws the playfield too low, so the bottom of the pulsing neon frame around the maze is cut off by the edge of the screen (on the console and in emulators alike). This port moves the picture up so the frame is complete.
• Runs light: about 7% CPU in gameplay on a desktop PC; 60 fps on a Steam Deck under Proton. Significant amounts of work spent tuning performance for Steam Deck, expect some minor dips but very playable.
• Renders at your screen's resolution (3x on 4K) with the picture never stretched; Vulkan or Direct3D 12.
• Plays from the game's package file as dumped from the console (STFS), or from unpacked files.
• Xbox controller and keyboard; fullscreen toggle (F11 / Alt+Enter).
• Your saves are backed up automatically; achievements are recorded locally (F7 or the Achievements menu).
• One build for Windows 10/11 and the Steam Deck.

Playing

Download the release zip, unpack it anywhere, and put your copy of the game in its game\ folder: either the package file from your console (a file with a long hexadecimal name) or the unpacked files (default.xex, media\, data\). Run pacman.exe. The included README.txt has the controls and options.

Building from source

Requirements: Windows, Visual Studio 2026 with the C++ workload and its Clang/LLVM tools, CMake, and your own copy of the game's default.xex (the recompiler reads the game code from it).

1. Build the ReXGlue SDK at the pinned commit with this project's patches and the Vulkan backend: see patches/rexglue-sdk/README.md.

2. Put your game files in private\ (git-ignored): at least default.xex, plus media\ and data\ to run from the build folder. If you only have the package file, extract default.xex from it with an STFS tool.

3. In a Visual Studio x64 developer prompt (vcvars64.bat) with Visual Studio's LLVM bin folder on PATH, from rexglue\:

   cmake --preset win-amd64-release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<SDK install dir>
   cmake --build --preset win-amd64-release
   

   The recompiler runs as part of the build and generates the game code into rexglue\generated\default\ (git-ignored: it is derived from the game).

4. rexglue\out\build\win-amd64-release\pacman.exe runs with the game files in private\. Tools\package_portable.ps1 builds the portable folder in dist\ (-Release also writes the release zips).

Repository layout

• rexglue\: the project: recompiler configuration (pacman_config.toml, extra_functions.toml) and the host code in src\ (startup and defaults, the hooks that fix busy-waiting and frame pacing, random mazes, ...).
• patches\rexglue-sdk\: the SDK patches this build needs.
• CLAUDE.md: detailed technical notes: what was found in the game's code and why each change was made.
• config\, host\, root CMakeLists.txt: an earlier attempt with XenonRecomp, kept for reference.

Licence

This project's own code is released under MIT No Attribution. The release binaries include third-party software under its own licences; see licenses\THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt in the release (from rexglue\licenses\). The source code of the LGPL parts (FFmpeg, libmspack) at the exact revisions used is attached to each release.

Pac-Man Championship Edition is © Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc.