WarriorsReborn

WarriorsReborn

A native Windows and Linux runtime that runs your own copy of The Warriors for the original Xbox on a PC.

It loads the game's original default.xbe from your disc at its native addresses and runs the game's own x86 code directly on the CPU. The runtime supplies what the console would: a replacement for the Xbox kernel, and high-level implementations of the Direct3D 8, audio (XACT / DirectSound) and input APIs, drawn with Vulkan and played through SDL2.

What it is not:

• Not an emulator of the whole console. There is no CPU, GPU or APU emulation; only the API boundary the game calls is reimplemented on the host.
• Not a decompilation. The repository contains no game code, decompiled or otherwise, and no game data. The game's code and assets only ever come from the disc you provide.

Features

• 60 fps mode (--sim60, experimental) with rate fixes for minigames and HUD timers authored for 30 fps, plus a frame-pacing lock for smooth presentation.
• Widescreen (16:9) reported to the game, so it widens its own view.
• 1080p and higher output resolutions (--resolution, --render-scale).
• Supersampling and MSAA (--supersample 2|4, --msaa 2|4|8) and anisotropic filtering.
• Sharpening: contrast-adaptive sharpening of the finished frame (--sharpen 1-100).
• HD shadows: higher-resolution and optionally soft character shadow maps.
• Shadow range (--shadow-range): character shadows no longer fall on floors far below them.
• Bloom (--bloom): street lamps, neon and fire give off a soft glow; the HUD and text stay sharp.
• Better rain (--rain-hd): thin falling streaks at several distances instead of the flat rain overlay, lit by the street lamps, with splashes and ripples on the ground (--no-rain-hd-splash turns those off), wet streets that reflect the lights (--rain-hd-wet), a gentle fade in and out, dry ground under roofs (--rain-hd-cover) and puddles with drop ripples (--rain-hd-puddles).
• Ambient occlusion (--ssao): soft contact shading in corners and under people and objects.
• Contact shadows (--contact-shadows): a short, soft shadow on the ground right under people, cars and props, so they stand on it instead of floating.
• Lamp lights (--lamp-lights): street lamps, fires and neon light up the ground, walls and people near them.
• Per-pixel lighting (--char-lighting, --world-lighting): those lights fall on people, walls, floors and buildings per pixel, following their shape, while the night mood stays.
• Fire light (--fire-light): burning fire barrels cast a warm, flickering light around them.
• Neon glow (--neon-glow): lit and neon signs glow at night, from emission masks you make from your own copy (see docs/TEXTURE_PACKS.md).
• Cinematic look (--filmic): a grade inspired by the 1979 film, with warm lights, teal shadows and deep blacks; the HUD and text stay as they are.
• Enhanced sky (--sky-hd): a sharper night sky in each level's own colours, with stars, drifting clouds, a moon and lit windows on the distant skyline.
• Sharp text (on by default): menu, HUD, mission and subtitle letters rebuilt at 4x from the game's own font, crisp at 1080p and above.
• Sharp faces (--sharp-faces): character faces and clothes at twice the detail, made from your own game's textures while you play.
• Soft particles (--soft-particles, opt-in): smoke, fire and dust fade out where they meet the ground and walls.
• Draw distance (--draw-distance, --prop-detail): fog, scenery and small props reach farther.
• More effects (--fx-scale): more blood, debris, smoke and sparks on screen at once.
• HD movies (--movie-hd, on by default): the disc's 1280x720 movies, drawn at your resolution.
• Cleaner sound: high-quality resampling to 48 kHz, room reverb, Doppler and a rear cue for 3D sounds, and sound packs (--sound-pack DIR).
• Smoothed character models (experimental, --mesh-pack DIR): made from your own game files with tools/mesh_pack and picked up from the characters-hd folder.
• HUD styles: cleaned-up and frosted-glass health bars (--hud-hd, --hud-hd-glass, --hud-glass).
• Texture-pack support: replacement textures (PNG or BC1/BC7 .dds) loaded in the background at run time within your graphics card's memory budget (--texture-pack DIR); guide in docs/TEXTURE_PACKS.md.
• Less CPU per frame: character and world vertex programs on the GPU, and a pipeline cache so places you visited before do not stutter.
• Show FPS (--fps-overlay): a small counter with FPS, frame time, CPU and GPU use.
• Skip intro (--skip-intro): start at the title screen without the boot movies.
• Spanish UI and the game's other languages (--language en|es|fr|de|it), with small text fixes applied in memory.
• Launcher (Dear ImGui) with a first-run wizard, presets and ISO install: pick your own Xbox disc image and the launcher checks and extracts it.
  • Three presets (Performance, Balanced, Quality); the launcher detects your graphics card and recommends one, with a video-memory meter for the chosen settings.
  • English or Spanish interface, with an adjustable interface size (Auto, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x).
  • Controls page to rebind keyboard and mouse, and a step-by-step set-up for a controller that SDL maps wrongly or does not know (written to gamecontrollerdb.txt).
  • Controllers card: name each controller and choose which player (1-4) it is, or Auto (--pad-slot).
  • In-game button icons: the game's own (Xbox), keyboard and mouse key caps drawn from your key map, or Auto (follows the device you used last); an optional button-icon pack.
  • Automatic save backups before each session, with restore.
  • "Copy report for a bug": a plain-text report of the last session with personal paths removed.
• Keyboard and mouse controls (rebindable), SDL game controllers, fullscreen toggle.

Install (Windows)

1. Download WarriorsReborn-v0.1.6-windows-x64.zip from the release page and unzip it into any folder (keep its files together).
2. Run warriors-launcher.exe.
3. In the first-run wizard, point it at your own legally obtained Xbox disc image (.iso). The launcher checks that it is The Warriors and copies the game files out of it once (about 5.2 GB, next to the launcher by default). Your .iso is only read. Nothing is downloaded.
4. Pick a preset (Performance, Balanced or Quality; the launcher suggests one for your graphics card) and press PLAY.

Requirements:

• A legally obtained copy of The Warriors for the original Xbox, as a disc image (.iso/xiso) or an extracted disc folder that contains default.xbe.
• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
• A GPU and driver with Vulkan support (Vulkan 1.0 or newer; current NVIDIA, AMD and Intel drivers include it).

Optional, not included: an HD texture pack (built with the tools in tools/ from textures the runtime dumps from your own copy, see "Optional tools") and a button-icon pack (your own edited copy of the game's button-icon atlas, see runtime/README.md). Both are chosen in the launcher.

Linux (from source): x86_64 with 32-bit glibc (libc6:i386), the 32-bit SDL2 library (libsdl2-2.0-0:i386) and a 32-bit Vulkan driver; run launcher/build/warriors-launcher.

See launcher/README.md for every launcher setting and runtime/README.md for the runtime's command line, controls and design notes. Every game option you can type in the launcher's Extra arguments field is listed in docs/ARGUMENTS.md.

Verifying a download

Each release zip is built from its tag by GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/release.yml), which records a signed build-provenance attestation for it. With the GitHub CLI, check that a zip you downloaded was built by this repository's workflow, and that it matches SHA256SUMS.txt from the same release page:

gh attestation verify WarriorsReborn-v0.1.6-windows-x64.zip --repo mattiasribera/WarriorsReborn
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt

On Windows without these tools, compare the output of certutil -hashfile WarriorsReborn-v0.1.6-windows-x64.zip SHA256 with SHA256SUMS.txt. The zip can also be rebuilt from source with tools/package_release.py (see tools/README.md).

Code signing policy

Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation. Who builds, reviews and approves signed releases, and what is signed, is in the code signing policy.

This program will not transfer any information to other networked systems unless specifically requested by the user or the person installing or operating it.

Known issues

• 60 FPS mode is new. If a cutscene or minigame looks or plays wrong, switch the frame rate to 30 (Display page) and report it.
• Controller remapping on Windows: XInput controllers (Xbox-style pads) share one mapping, so remapping the buttons of one XInput pad changes all XInput pads.
• The executables are not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen or an antivirus may warn when you first run them. Choose "More info" > "Run anyway" only if you downloaded the zip from this project's release page and its SHA-256 matches SHA256SUMS.txt.

Building from source

Everything is built with zig (tested with 0.17.0) from a Linux host; the Windows binaries are cross-compiled.

# Linux host packages (Debian/Ubuntu names)
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt install libc6:i386 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 libvulkan-dev glslang-tools

# Runtime: Linux binary (xbrun) and test programs
make -C runtime -j4 VULKAN_INCLUDE=/usr/include GLSLANG=glslangValidator
# Runtime: Windows (TheWarriors.exe + xbrun-core.dll)
make -C runtime -j4 windows VULKAN_INCLUDE=/usr/include GLSLANG=glslangValidator

# Launcher: SDL2 development package once, then Linux and Windows builds
make -C launcher sdl2-devel
make -C launcher -j4
make -C launcher -j4 windows

# Tests (no game data needed; tests that need it are skipped)
python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -p 'test_*.py'

# Public-tree guard (also runs in CI)
python3 tools/check_public_tree.py

The VULKAN_INCLUDE and GLSLANG defaults point at a Homebrew installation; override them as above when using distribution packages. Run the runtime directly with:

runtime/build/xbrun <disc>/default.xbe <disc> --hdd <save-dir> [options]

Optional tools

These tools work only on your own copy of the game and write their output to local, git-ignored folders. Nothing they produce belongs in this repository or in a release.

Tool	Purpose
tools/xdvdfs_extract.py	List and extract files from an Xbox (XDVDFS) disc image
tools/wad_extract.py	Unpack the game's WAD archives from your disc
tools/texture_upscale.py, tools/spandrel_infer.py	Build an upscaled texture pack from textures the runtime dumped from your copy (Real-ESRGAN or PyTorch/spandrel models)
tools/texture_compress.py	Turn a PNG texture pack into BC1/BC7 .dds files (smaller, faster to load; needs bc7enc)
tools/texture_review.py	Review page to approve or reject upscaled textures
tools/icon/make_icon.py	Draws the application icon from geometry (no game artwork)
tools/d3d_census.py, tools/scan_rw_chunks.py	Developer diagnostics on your own default.xbe / disc files
tools/ratediff/	Developer diagnostic comparing 30 Hz and 60 Hz runs

Third-party software

Component	Used by	Licence
Dear ImGui	launcher GUI (launcher/third_party/imgui)	MIT
Inter font	launcher GUI (launcher/third_party/inter)	SIL Open Font License 1.1
stb_image / stb_image_write	texture packs (runtime/third_party/stb)	MIT or public domain
SDL2	window, input, audio (loaded at run time, shipped as SDL2.dll on Windows)	zlib
Vulkan headers and loader	renderer	Apache-2.0

Optional tools may use Pillow, NumPy, PyTorch, spandrel and Real-ESRGAN, which are installed separately under their own licences. The licence texts of bundled components are kept next to their sources.

Legal

• No game files are included in this repository or in its releases: no executable, code, scripts, text, textures, audio, video or fonts from the game. You must own a legitimate copy of The Warriors and supply it yourself.
• This project is an independent, non-commercial runtime. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, Paramount or Microsoft.
• The Warriors and all related names and marks are trademarks of their respective owners; "Xbox" is a trademark of Microsoft. They are used here only to identify the game and platform the runtime is compatible with.
• Do not open issues or pull requests containing game files, extracted assets, screenshots of game content or decompiled game code; they will be removed.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2026 Mattias Ribera Rojas

WarriorsReborn is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; see LICENSE for the full text.

This licence covers the code in this repository only. Third-party components keep their own licences (see "Third-party software"). The Warriors and all of its content belong to their owners and are not part of this project.