The Sims - Static Recompilation

The Sims — original Xbox, statically recompiled for PC

A native port of The Sims (original Xbox, USA retail) to Linux and Windows by static recompilation of the game's own executable: the retail default.xbe's x86 code is translated to C++ once, at build time, and runs against XboxXBERecomp's host runtime — Vulkan and SDL3 on Linux, Direct3D 12 and XAudio2 on Windows. No Wine, no emulator, no original Xbox hardware.

This is the fourth Maxis console Sims title ported with this framework, after The Urbz, The Sims: Bustin' Out and The Sims 2, and the first on XDK 5233, a build the SDK shipped no signatures for — the 5233 signature set, data layout and symbol proof in this repository are this port's own work.

What works

• Boots from the disc image, plays its intro movies, and reaches its menus, Create a Sim and a playable household in live mode, unattended, every run tried (17 of 17; docs/playtest.md).
• The whole frame loop presents at ~60 fps with 860–2208 draws a frame in live mode.
• The F1 settings panel (display mode, resolution, aspect, ultrawide, vsync, frame cap, HDR on Windows, render scale, anisotropic filtering, key bindings, and this game's own typed-word cheats as toggle rows) and the F2 performance panel (frame-time graph, fps/ms, backend, counters).
• Keyboard and mouse as controller port 0, plus a real gamepad through SDL3 — a DualSense (PS5) pad reaches the title's own XInputGetState, analogue triggers and all.
• Game speed is real time at any frame rate: the engine's 60th-of-a-second quantiser is replaced with a host-clock tick, measured 1.000 simulated seconds per real second at 60, 144 and uncapped (docs/frame-rate.md).
• The picture rect is measured from the game's own renderer — it draws 640×432 at y=24 inside its 640×480 back buffer — so there are no overscan bars (docs/picture-rect.md).
• Runs on real Windows. The released Sims1.exe boots, mounts the disc image straight out of assets/, draws through Direct3D 12 and sounds through XAudio2 (Windows 11 26200, RTX 5060 Ti; docs/status.md).

What does not (yet)

• Full-screen movies are trimmed by the measured 24-row picture crop: they are copied raw over all 480 rows, so the crop takes 24 rows off them (docs/picture-rect.md).
• Hor+ ultrawide widens the frame target, but the title's own aspect path has not been analysed.

The authoritative list, with evidence, is docs/status.md.

Building (Linux)

Bring your own disc: drop the disc image into assets/ as a .iso and that is the whole setup — the port mounts it as the console's D: at startup, and build.sh takes default.xbe back out of it for the recompiler (the build needs that one file on disk). Extracting the 14 disc files into assets/ yourself with tools/xiso_extract.py works too, and is not faster.

./build.sh                 # configures, writes config/game.toml, builds out/build/linux-release/Sims1

Requirements: clang, cmake ≥ 3.25, ninja, python3, a Vulkan loader. SDL3, ImGui, Zydis, toml++ and the shader compilers are fetched at configure time. The first build recompiles the whole XBE (12889 functions; about two minutes on a recent machine).

Building (Windows, cross-compiled from Linux)

cmake --preset host-tools && cmake --build --preset host-tools
cmake --preset windows-cross && cmake --build --preset windows-cross

cmake/windows-cross.cmake drives clang-cl + lld-link against an xwin-downloaded Windows SDK; out/build/windows-cross/Sims1.exe is the result. On Windows itself, build.bat does the same with a local MSVC and LLVM — about two minutes for the whole XBE on a 12-thread desktop.

Running

The executable finds the game beside it in assets/: the disc image as a .iso, or the disc's files extracted there. Runtime switches the siblings share:

• XBE_PERF=1 — per-second draw/upload/voice counters.
• XBE_CAPTURE_DIR=cap + F3 — dump a frame (frame.txt, per-target BMPs) and every guest thread's stack.
• F1 settings, F2 frame times.
• SIMS1_AUTOSTART=1 — a repeating pad cycle through the intro movies (a self-test).
• SIMS1_NO_STEP=1, SIMS1_NO_CALLBACK=1 — switch the frame-step fix and the push-buffer callback body off, to bisect against the stock behaviour.

Repository layout

Path	What it is
config/game.toml	the recompiler input: XDK symbol addresses (128 of 242 named; the rest proven absent from this image) and data addresses
config/found-*.toml	per-area symbol proofs, merged by tools/merge_symbols.py
sdk/xdk/5233/	this port's XDK 5233 signature set (seeded from 5558, then signed from this image) and the proven data layout
src/common/	the overlay (F1/F2), keyboard/mouse-as-pad, the title record, the cheat table
src/game/	the game hooks: the frame-step quantiser fix, the D3DDevice_InsertCallback body, the cheat entry
docs/	every proof: symbol naming, layout, boot defects, frame rate, picture rect, cheats, playtest
tools/	disc extraction, XBE analysis, symbol merging/alignment, the unattended driving loop

Legal

Bring your own disc. The disc image, default.xbe, everything extracted into assets/, the generated recompilation and all build output stay out of git; only names, addresses, proofs and port code are tracked. Nothing here distributes EA's or Maxis's content.