WCW vs. nWo World Tour: Recompiled

WCW vs. nWo World Tour: Recompiled brings WCW vs. nWo World Tour to PC.

README

WCW vs. nWo World Tour: Recompiled

WCW vs. nWo World Tour: Recompiled is a project that uses N64Recomp to statically recompile the Nintendo 64 game WCW vs. nWo World Tour (USA) into a native PC port, running on the N64ModernRuntime with RT64 as the rendering engine.

This repository and its releases do not contain game assets. The original game is required to build or run this project.

Status: beta. The game is fully playable end to end — boots, renders, full matches with sound, keyboard + gamepad input, menus, local multiplayer, rumble, and persistent saves. See Known Issues for what's still rough.

In-ring gameplay rendered at high resolution
Wrestler select Mode select menu

Table of Contents

System Requirements

Currently a Windows build is provided; other operating systems may be supported later.

A GPU supporting Direct3D 12.0 (Shader Model 6) or Vulkan 1.2 is required. A CPU supporting the SSE4.1 instruction set is also required (Intel Core 2 Penryn series or AMD Bulldozer and newer).

If you have crashes on startup, make sure your graphics drivers are fully up to date.

Features

Plug and Play

Provide your copy of the US version of the game and start playing! The project loads assets directly from your ROM, so there is no separate extraction or build step.

Fully Intact N64 Effects

Rendering is hardware-accelerated through RT64 at high resolution, with the game's original visual effects intact — no emulator-style workarounds or hacks.

Local Multiplayer for up to 4 Players

Plug in up to four controllers and each pad is automatically assigned to the next free player — no setup needed. The keyboard always drives player 1 by default, and a player-assignment menu is available for custom arrangements (e.g. keyboard as player 2).

Widescreen Support

With Aspect Ratio set to Expand (the default), the 3D scene renders at your window's aspect ratio with a correctly widened field of view, while 2D interface elements stay at their original proportions.

Easy-to-Use Menus

Press Esc (or your gamepad's Back/Select button) during play to open the config menu: general settings, graphics settings, full input rebinding for keyboard and controller (two bindings per input), and audio settings. Menus can be used with mouse, keyboard, or controller.

Controls Tailored to This Game

World Tour moves on the N64 d-pad and taunts with the analog stick, so the default mappings are built for that: move on the left stick and d-pad, taunt on the right stick, and the defensive pair on mirrored triggers (duck = left trigger, block = right trigger). Grapple = A, attack = X, run = B, climb/turnbuckle = Y, switch focus = bumpers. Keyboard: WASD moves, IJKL taunts, Space/Shift/Q/E/R for the face buttons. Everything is rebindable in the in-game menu.

Saves and Rumble Without Pak Juggling

On real hardware this game saves only to a Controller Pak and rumbles only with a Rumble Pak — one slot, physically swapped. The port emulates a hybrid pak: saves always work and persist automatically, and if you answer the game's "Insert a Rumble Pak now" prompt at the title screen, rumble works too, with no risk to your save data.

Planned Features

  • High framerate support (frame interpolation) — see Known Issues
  • Linux support
  • Mod support

FAQ

What is static recompilation?

Static recompilation is the process of automatically translating an application from one platform to another — here, the game's original MIPS machine code is translated into C and compiled for modern PCs. For details, see N64Recomp. This is not an emulator and not a decompilation.

How is this related to a decompilation project?

It isn't — no public decompilation of WCW vs. nWo World Tour exists. Unlike most recompilation ports, which borrow symbol names from a decomp, this project generated its own symbol metadata from scratch via a splat disassembly (see disasm/ and the WCWSyms submodule).

Where is the savefile stored?
  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\WCWRecompiled\saves\

Configuration files and the log file live one level up in the same app folder. Save data is preserved across updates.

Can you run this project as a portable application?

Yes — place a file named portable.txt in the same folder as the executable and saves, config files, and the stored ROM will be kept next to the executable instead.

Can I mod the game?

User-facing mod support (like the other recomp ports have) is planned but not here yet. What exists today is developer-level: game-behavior patches written in C and compiled to MIPS (the widescreen feature is implemented this way). If you want to write one, see the "Working on patches" section of BUILDING.md.

How do I choose a different ROM?

You don't. This project is only a port of WCW vs. nWo World Tour, and it only accepts one specific ROM: the US (NTSC-U) N64 release (SHA1 5AD2D8359058C8BB71F08E3D3433B7A50D3BB645). It is not an emulator and it cannot run any arbitrary ROM.

You can't accidentally load the wrong file — the launcher validates the ROM before storing its own copy (so the original file can be moved or deleted afterwards). If the stored copy ever goes missing or gets corrupted, the launcher simply offers Load ROM again.

Known Issues

  • Frame interpolation is disabled (Framerate is locked to Original). The game builds each visual frame from several RSP tasks and submits fully composed matrices, which defeats RT64's frame-interpolation heuristics — interpolated frames warp geometry. High-framerate support needs game-side matrix-group patches and is planned.
  • Rumble works for player 1 only — the emulated pak lives in controller port 1, matching the game's own pak handling.
  • Overlays such as MSI Afterburner and other software such as Wallpaper Engine can cause performance issues that prevent the game from rendering correctly. Disabling such software is recommended.

Building

Building is not required to play — grab a release instead. To build from source, see BUILDING.md.

Libraries Used and Projects Referenced

Special Thanks

  • Wiseguy and DarioSamo for creating N64Recomp and RT64.
  • RevoSucks and the Bomberman Hero: Recompiled project, the direct template for this port.
  • The Zelda64Recomp team for establishing the conventions the whole recomp ecosystem follows.
  • ethteck and the splat/spimdisasm contributors — the disassembly tooling that made a no-decomp recompilation possible.