Turok: Recompiled

Turok: Recompiled

Made with AI. Almost all of the code, documentation and tests in this repo were written by AI agents (Claude), directed and play-tested by a person. None of it is offered to the upstream projects it builds on, which don't take AI-written code.

A native PC port of the N64 Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (USA), made by static recompilation (N64Recomp + N64ModernRuntime + RT64, with RecompFrontend's launcher and menus): the game's own MIPS code translated to C and run natively, with RT64 drawing it. It is not an emulator. The functions are found in the ROM's code, with no decompilation, and what the Turok games share (the function finder, the Controller Pak, libultra the runtime lacks) is in turok-engine, this repo's lib/turok-engine.

The repo holds no ROM, no asset from the game and no data extracted from it: you supply your own ROM, and nothing in git or CI is made from one except the symbol names, addresses and sizes in syms/ and where the code is in the ROM (syms/layout.toml).

Status: released for Windows and Linux (releases/). The desktop build plays from boot through the intro and the title menu into the first level, with sound, and keyboard, mouse and gamepad input. The game hasn't been played past the first level's start yet. The map (Tab) draws its lines, which the game draws with the L3DEX line microcode (turok-engine's RT64 patches). The same game plays in a browser through WebGPU, at n64hub.com/turok-dinosaur-hunter (docs/web.md).

Playing

• Widescreen: the Expand aspect ratio (Graphics tab) widens the 3D to the window and puts the HUD at its sides.

• One player: the game has no multiplayer, so it is played on one controller, port 1's, and every pad and the keyboard play it (RecompFrontend's single-player mode, src/main/main.cpp): there are no ports to give each pad.

• Controls, all rebindable on the Controls tab:

  	Keyboard and mouse	Controller
  Move and strafe	W A S D	left stick
  Look	mouse, or the arrow keys	right stick
  Fire	left mouse button, or Left Ctrl	right trigger
  Jump	Space	bottom face button, or the left trigger
  Change weapon	Q and E	the shoulder buttons
  Map	Tab	top face button
  Pause	Enter	Start

  The mouse turns and looks as the right stick does, on from the first start (General, Mouse Sensitivity, 50%; 0 turns it off and leaves the cursor free). Settings saved by v0.1.x have it at 0: turn it up there.

The ROM

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (USA, revision 1.0), as a big-endian .z64 of 8 MiB with SHA-1 40fb0250c095740031278fb1f82b9937a3895e01. Other regions and revisions are not supported.

The game keeps its main program packed (RNC method 1). The build unpacks it from your ROM into roms/turok1.us.recomp.z64 (tools/unpack_main.py) for the recompiler; the game itself still unpacks it from the ROM you load, as on the console.

Building

You need that ROM at roms/turok1.us.z64 and Python 3. On Windows: LLVM's clang-cl, CMake 3.31 and Ninja, and a clang with a MIPS backend plus ld.lld for patches/ (WSL's will do). On Linux: clang lld libsdl2-dev libgtk-3-dev libfreetype-dev, CMake 3.31 and Ninja.

From the repo's root in a bash shell:

git -c core.longpaths=true submodule update --init --recursive   # paths past Windows' 260 characters
bash tools/recompile.sh -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl   # the game's code as C
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo \
      -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl \
      -DPATCHES_C_COMPILER=<MIPS clang> -DPATCHES_LD=<ld.lld>
ninja -C build TurokRecompiled

On Linux, the same with clang and clang++. tools/recompile.sh builds N64Recomp from the submodule the first time, unpacks the main program, then translates the game. Run build/TurokRecompiled from the repo's root, pick the ROM with Load ROM, then Start Game.

syms/ is written from the unpacked ROM by python3 lib/turok-engine/tools/gen_syms.py (it needs pip install spimdisasm); run it again only when the engine's finder or syms/names.toml changes.

Releases

Each release is built where the ROM is, by tools/release.sh (its header says how), from the merge commit of a pull request titled "Release v" that bumps version_string in src/main/main.cpp and moves releases/next.md, where each change adds what the player gets, to releases/v<version>.md, the release's notes.

License

GPL-3.0. The game itself is not included and belongs to its owners.