SCDA V1 Recomp

[!NOTE] You can play the whole game. Every mission loads, plays and saves, and missions lead into each other like on the console. The installer is out: get SCDA_Setup.exe from the latest release.

[!WARNING] This build still has visual bugs. I fix as many as I can, but fixing one sometimes brings out a new one. The game is fully playable with them. If you see one, please report it with screenshots or a video and your log file.

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What is this?

The Xbox 360 version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent is the better of the two versions, but it only runs on a 360 or in an emulator. This project turns the game's Xbox 360 program into a real Windows program.

How, in plain terms:

• The game code is translated ahead of time. A tool reads the console's PowerPC code and rewrites all of it as C++, which is then compiled for your PC. Nothing is emulated while you play.
• A small "fake console" fills in the rest. The game still expects an Xbox 360 around it (its operating system, graphics chip and sound chip). This project provides those pieces on Windows:
  • System calls (files, threads, saves, your profile) go to Windows.
  • Graphics go to Direct3D 11. The game's own shaders are converted to PC shaders on the fly.
  • Sound (the Xbox 360's XMA format) is decoded with FFmpeg and played through XAudio2.

What's new

November 2026

• JBA headquarters looks right. Big dark triangles no longer cover the walls and floors, and you can't see through the walls anymore. Some level geometry was being built from the wrong points.
• The Iceland shack is solid. Its roof and walls had holes from the inside. It was the same bug as the JBA HQ walls.
• Hotel windows work. Looking in through the rainy glass on the outside of the hotel, you now see the room and the people inside, not big blurry blocks. A small mistake in how the game's shaders were converted broke this effect.
• Hotel mirrors are back. The bathroom mirrors reflect Sam and the room again instead of showing a dark wall.
• Hotel wardrobe stays the same. Its red lattice doors no longer turn plain white until you walk up close.
• No more flickering moon in New York. The moon and clouds no longer pop out for a frame at a time.
• No more black walls and floors at the start of Kinshasa, on the Osprey ramp in Iceland and in the Cozumel room. A fix for New York's sky also darkened large surfaces close to the camera.
• Cozumel's sea reaches the horizon. The black, jagged strip between the sea and the sky is gone.
• Reflections and water. Shiny surfaces and water reflect again instead of showing black.
• Shadows. Kinshasa's ground is no longer covered in shadow, and the dark strip at the bottom of the screen in New York and the Hotel is gone.
• No more black flashes in the JBA headquarters, including the floor and walls blinking out while you turn the camera.
• EMF vision looks like the console's.
• Smaller fixes: the strip at the bottom of the sniper scope, sparks and other particles, and a few texture and model formats. Every one of the game's 4,532 shaders now converts and compiles.
• PlayStation and Switch controllers work directly, with rumble. On-screen button icons match whatever you're holding, keyboard included, even on the loading screens.
• Field of view slider in the F1 menu (60-110, the game uses 75). L1/R1 switch tabs.
• Installer got a new look, a Start menu shortcut and an update mode that only swaps the game program. Your saves and settings are kept.

Earlier

• Darkness matches the console. The game sets up its own brightness curve at startup. That's now applied, so night scenes and dark rooms are as dark as on the Xbox 360.
• Real anti-aliasing and no more glow streaks. The console's 4x anti-aliasing is now done the way the 360 does it, which also removed yellow and orange streaks in Jail and Iceland.
• Sea of Okhotsk fixed. No more black screen underwater or white screen when looking up at the ice.
• Sun shadows fixed in Kinshasa: no more long dark wedges and smeared walls.
• Things stop vanishing. Objects no longer disappear every other frame when the PC is busy.
• New York at full speed. The heavy New York map got a big speed-up (see Known issues).
• Clean goggles option. Night, thermal and EMF vision without scanlines and noise.
• Music loops without a gap, and the last placeholder system calls now do real work.
• Missions end properly. Finishing a mission shows MISSION COMPLETE, saves your progress, plays the cutscene and starts the next mission, all without restarting the program.
• Higher resolution. Scale=2 to 4 renders at 2560x1440 up to 5120x2880 and shrinks it to your window, which makes edges very smooth.
• Sharper, steadier textures. Distant surfaces no longer shimmer, and floors and walls stay sharp at an angle (anisotropic filtering up to 16x).
• Brightness fixed at higher resolutions. Scenes no longer turn twice as bright above Scale=1.
• Checkpoints, restart and quit all work, as many times as you like in one session.
• Mouse works with a controller plugged in. A slightly drifting stick no longer blocks the mouse and keyboard.

Screenshots

Taken from the current build (November 2026) on Windows at Scale=2 (2560x1440) with 16x anisotropic filtering.

Cozumel: the sea reaches the horizon	Iceland: the geothermal plant at night
Iceland: EMF vision	Iceland: Osprey bay before the drop
Ellsworth Penitentiary: helping Jamie escape	Sea of Okhotsk: diving under the ice
Kinshasa: getting the plans, with sun shadows	Shanghai: arriving at the hotel
New York: JBA headquarters	Shanghai: the bathroom mirror reflects Sam again
Kinshasa: the alley at the start, walls no longer black	Cozumel: the cabin and its balcony
Iceland: the light shaft through the ice hole	Iceland: the Osprey ramp in night vision
Sea of Okhotsk: swimming under the ice

How far along is it?

Part	State
Menus and profile	✅ Works
Missions	✅ All 18 single-player maps load and play
During a mission	✅ Checkpoints after failing, restart, quit to menu, load from the pause menu
Menu to mission, mission to mission	✅ Works without restarting the program (mission to mission tested with a debug shortcut, not a full playthrough yet)
Saving and loading	✅ Saves go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\SCDARecomp. Your position and difficulty come back
Graphics	🟡 Almost everything matches the console. A few small differences are left (see below)
Sound	✅ Music, 3D sound, dialogue and cutscene audio
Controls	✅ Xbox, PlayStation and Switch controllers. 🟡 Mouse and keyboard work but need more testing
Multiplayer / Xbox Live	❌ Not planned for now

Known issues

• Most maps hold the game's 30 fps limit. New York's busiest areas can drop to about 25 fps.
• No ultrawide support yet. 21:9 and 32:9 are planned (issue #2).
• Above Scale=1, a post-processing effect can miss the very last row or column of pixels, and a faint line can show up about a third of the way down the screen.

Reporting bugs

Open an issue and include:

• Screenshots or a short video of the bug.
• Where it happened: the mission and the area.
• Your log file: scda.log in your install folder, next to scda.exe. It's replaced every time you start the game, so copy it right after the bug happens.
• Your %LOCALAPPDATA%\SCDARecomp\settings.ini, if you changed any settings.

Ideas

Have an idea or a feature you'd like to see? Post it in Ideas. Bugs go in Issues (see above).

Coming next

Roughly in this order:

1. Play the whole story by hand, start to finish, and fix what turns up.
2. Ultrawide and more PC options, once the graphics are settled.

How to play

[!IMPORTANT] No game files come with this project. You need your own copy of Splinter Cell: Double Agent for Xbox 360. It's made for the USA, Europe disc (as an .iso file). Other versions won't work.

1. Download SCDA_Setup.exe from the latest release (or build it yourself, see below). The installer isn't code-signed, so Windows or your antivirus may warn about it. If Windows says "Windows protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway.
2. Run SCDA_Setup.exe, pick your disc image (.iso) and a folder to install to. It checks that your disc is the right one and copies the game files into <folder>\game.
3. Start scda.exe from that folder.

Extra Settings menu. Open it from the game's own OPTIONS > EXTRA SETTINGS (it replaces TV calibration; brightness and contrast stay on the OPTIONS page), or any time with F1 or L3+R3. It has three tabs:

• Display: window mode, VSync, resolution scale, texture sharpness (anisotropic filtering), field of view, light distance and clean goggles.
• Graphics: quality presets (Low to Ultra), extra smoothing (FXAA, on top of the game's own 4x anti-aliasing), sharpening, and upscaling (renders at a lower resolution and scales it up, for slower PCs).
• Update: your version and the newest version on GitHub. After you sign in at the main menu, a small message in the top right tells you if there's an update.

Changes apply right away and are saved. Close the menu with Esc, F1, Start or L3+R3.

Settings are stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\SCDARecomp\settings.ini:

[Display]
Scale=2
Anisotropy=16
Mode=borderless
VSync=1
CleanGoggles=0
AntiAliasing=Off
Sharpening=0
Upscaling=Off
FOV=75
[Input]
MouseLook=1
MouseSensitivity=1.0
MouseInvertY=0

• Scale (1-4): the game renders at 1280x720 times this number, then shrinks it to your window. 2 = 2560x1440.
• Anisotropy (1-16): keeps floors and walls sharp when you look at them at an angle.
• Mode: windowed, borderless or fullscreen.
• CleanGoggles=1: no scanlines or noise in the goggle views.
• FOV (60-110): field of view.
• Don't put comments on the same line as a setting.

Building it yourself

You need: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 (with CMake and Ninja), LLVM clang-cl, Python 3 and Git.

:: 1. third-party sources go in external/ (XenonRecomp, XenosRecomp, UnleashedRecomp, ffmpeg)
tools\build_xenonrecomp.bat        :: applies tools\patches\xenonrecomp_scda.patch
tools\xex_dump\build.bat
tools\ffmpeg\configure.bat
:: 2. translate the game's code into generated/ (needs your own SC4_Offline.xex in assets/)
sh tools/recomp.sh
:: 3. build the program and run the tests
tools\build_runtime.bat
tools\test_runtime.bat

STATE.md has the detailed build notes, debug switches and current findings.

What's in the repo

Folder	What's inside
runtime/	The "fake console": system calls, threads, memory, graphics (including the shader converter) and sound
config/	Settings for the code translator (where functions and jump tables are)
tools/	Installer, game file tools, build and check scripts, tests
docs/	Notes, plans and screenshots

Credits

Built on XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp, with ideas from UnleashedRecomp, all by hedge-dev. A lot of what we know about the Xbox 360 hardware comes from Xenia. Sound decoding uses FFmpeg. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. The source code is licensed under GPL-3.0 (LICENSE).

Legal

This is an unofficial fan project. It isn't made, approved or supported by Ubisoft or Microsoft. Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Sam Fisher and everything related belong to Ubisoft Entertainment. Xbox and Xbox 360 are trademarks of Microsoft.

• No game files are included. This repository only has original source code, build scripts and settings (like where functions are in the game's program). It contains no game program, graphics, sound, video or text.
• You need to own the game. The installer only works with your own Xbox 360 disc image of Splinter Cell: Double Agent. It checks the image and builds the game files on your own PC. Please don't ask for or share game files or disc images here. Those issues will be closed.
• No piracy. This project doesn't help anyone get the game. To read the game's code, the tools unpack the program from your own disc on your own PC, the same way other Xbox 360 recompilation projects do.
• Screenshots in docs/images/ were taken with this project running the author's own copy of the game. They're only here to show progress.
• Rights holders: if you have a concern, please open an issue or contact the maintainer, and it will be handled quickly.