Arizona Vamp Recomp

A native PC port of Darkwatch (original Xbox, 2005), made by static recompilation.

The game's Xbox executable is translated ahead of time into native x86-64 code. Its graphics and sound calls are answered by modern APIs: Direct3D 8 runs on Direct3D 12, DirectSound on XAudio2. Nothing is emulated at run time, so the game runs at full speed with PC features layered on top: the two-player co-op campaign the Xbox release left out, real display modes, render scaling, MSAA, keyboard and mouse, and an in-game settings menu.

No game data is included. You need your own copy of Darkwatch for the original Xbox. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's publisher or developer.

Two-player Split-screen Co-op campaign

Play the whole campaign with a friend, split screen, on one PC. Co-op was a PlayStation 2 exclusive: the Xbox release shipped without it. Its code and menus are still on the Xbox disc, switched off, and this port turns them back on:

• Main menu, MULTIPLAYER: the game now asks VERSUS or CO-OP.
• CO-OP opens the two-player profile screen (both players press A), then the chapter list, and the chapters play split screen with two gunslingers.
• Player 1 uses the first controller (or keyboard and mouse), player 2 the second controller (Xbox, PlayStation or Switch).
• Versus split screen (up to four players) is unchanged.

Co-op runs on the single-player level files (the co-op versions of a few files were never put on the Xbox disc). Both players currently look like the single-player hero; giving player 2 their own model is on the roadmap. Co-op has been tested through the start of the first chapter so far: tell us how far you get (F4 report).

Status

Beta, playable on Windows. The game boots, plays its movies and goes through the front end into the campaign, with sound, music, lighting, fog and the HUD close to the console, at 60 fps or more. Testers have played into the first chapter's boss fight on the train. A full play-through has not been done yet; that is the next big step, and every F4 report helps.

Platform	State
Windows 10/11 x64	Main target. Release zips on the releases page.
Linux (Proton)	Untested. A black-screen fix for Proton is in; reports welcome.
macOS (Apple silicon)	Later. A headless test harness builds and reaches PRESS START.
Android	Later.

Day-to-day progress, findings and open bugs are in STATUS.md.

Features

Runs natively

• Statically recompiled game code: no CPU emulation, no JIT.
• Direct3D 12 renderer with a shader disk cache: shaders compile once, later runs load without hitches.
• Shader pre-compile at launch: the pipelines earlier play used are kept for your graphics driver. When the driver changes (or the cache is cleared) they compile again at launch behind a progress bar, with Skip and Don't show this again (turn it back on under PC settings, Graphics).
• XAudio2 sound, including the game's XACT audio.

PC settings, in two places with the same options:

• PC SETTINGS in the main menu's OPTIONS and in the pause menu (it replaces the Xbox Live entry) is the game's own page, with its look, sounds and a help line for each row. Left and right change a value (arrow keys, d-pad or left stick), and the mouse works there too.
• F1 (or Back + Start on a controller) opens the full menu anywhere, over the game.
• Display: fullscreen / borderless / windowed, resolution, render resolution 25-200%, frame-rate cap, V-Sync. A new display mode asks to be kept and goes back after 15 seconds.
• Graphics: MSAA anti-aliasing (2x / 4x / 8x), field of view (55, the game's, to 110; 80 by default) and a separate weapon field of view, widescreen framing (a wide screen shows more at the sides instead of a stretched 4:3 picture; on by default), reticle size, in-level cut-scene borders (off by default), anisotropic filtering (16x by default), optional PS2 alpha blending (removes the previous-frame ghosting that the Xbox version has).
• Controls: button prompts (the controller in use, or Xbox / PlayStation / Switch / keyboard and mouse), keyboard and mouse on or off, mouse look and sensitivity, direct mouse aiming, mouse in the game's menus, key rebinding.
• Game: frame-rate counter, the War Train chapter and Splitter grenades (below).
• Changes apply at once and are saved to settings.toml. Exit to Desktop is one click away.

Input

• Controllers work as on the console: Xbox, PlayStation and Switch Pro pads, and paired Joy-Cons (through SDL; the buttons go by position, so a Switch pad's bottom button is A).
• Button prompts that match your controller: with a PlayStation pad the game's prompts show cross, circle, square and triangle (and R2 / L2); with a Switch pad its letters (B, A, Y, X by position, and ZR / ZL). With the keyboard and mouse they show the key or mouse button bound to each control, and follow your rebinding. The pictures switch as soon as you pick up another controller, in the menus and in the in-level hints.
• Full keyboard and mouse support for player 1, with raw mouse look and rebindable keys.
• Mouse in the game's menus: point at a row to pick it, left click selects, right click goes back, the wheel steps through the rows. The cursor shows in menus and the mouse goes back to looking when play resumes.
• Direct mouse aiming on foot: the view turns by how far the mouse moves, with no stick curve and no aim assist. On the horse and in split screen the mouse works as the right stick.

Content the Xbox disc leaves off

• The War Train chapter and the Splitter grenade pickups (D-pad up, the Up arrow, changes grenade type), with the Xbox dynamite that stood in for them taken out. Your files are not changed: three selectors are swapped as the game reads them. On by default; PC settings, Game.

For testers

• F4 opens a bug-report box: type what you saw, and a folder with your note, a frame capture, the log tail and your settings is saved to reports\.
• F3 captures a frame (every draw call, render target and shader) for debugging.

Fixes over a straight port

• Frame rates above 100: the game's actor scripts skipped every frame shorter than 10 ms, so scripted things (doors, enemies) stood still at 120 or 144 fps. They now run every frame.
• QUIT TO DESKTOP in the main menu.
• 32 voices instead of three for streamed 3D sounds: two level-long loops held two of the three, and one-shots such as the horse's cry in THE WRONG TRAIN were dropped.
• No crash when the game stops a sound while the sound engine's timer updates the same list (issue #2): the host keeps the two apart as the console's single processor did.
• Starts from disc images and unpacked files with no or very old file dates (the game stopped on its own date check).
• Fog-streak fix in the meat-locker corridor (the game's own screen-space texture scale, patched).
• Xbox Live entries turned into the PC settings menu, and the front end's "Sign-in failed." status line gone.
• Saves stay beside the game (hdd\E), so a copied folder keeps them.

Installing (Windows)

1. Download the zip from the latest release and unpack it anywhere (about 3 GB free needed).
2. Put your game in the assets folder: your disc image (.iso), or default.xbe with the game's folders beside it.
3. Run Darkwatch.exe. The first start builds the game's code for your PC from your own copy, behind a progress window. That takes a while and happens only once; after it, the game starts straight away.

The release contains no game code: it ships the recompiler and a compiler (Clang and LLD) instead, and the game is built on your PC from your files, as in BLACK-XBERecomp.

Building from source (Windows)

You need:

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, and a GPU with Direct3D 12.
• Visual Studio 2022 (Community is fine) with Desktop development with C++. build.bat offers to add the Clang and CMake components it needs.
• Git.
• Your own Darkwatch game files: default.xbe and the folders beside it, from your disc.

git clone https://github.com/Clergyman0013/arizona-vamp-recomp.git
cd arizona-vamp-recomp

rem the recompilation SDK, at the tested commit, with this project's patch
git clone https://github.com/TGP482/XboxXBERecomp.git third_party\XboxXBERecomp
git -C third_party\XboxXBERecomp checkout 99078b1
git -C third_party\XboxXBERecomp apply ..\..\patches\xboxxberecomp-darkwatch.patch

rem copy default.xbe and the game's folders into darkwatch-hle\assets\, then:
darkwatch-hle\build.bat

The first build recompiles the game and takes 30 to 90 minutes; later builds take a few minutes. The result is darkwatch-hle\out\build\release\Darkwatch.exe, with the game code in Darkwatch.dll beside it. build.bat offers to start it when it is done. darkwatch-hle\release.bat then makes the release zip (it needs 7-Zip), without the game code.

If CMake fails while fetching its dependencies (some PCs with Mandatory ASLR on cannot run Git's shell scripts), run darkwatch-hle\tools\deps_windows.bat once, then build.bat again.

Playing

Run Darkwatch.exe. Settings live in settings.toml beside it, written on the first run; the menu edits it for you.

Key	Action	Key	Action
W A S D	move	Mouse	look
Left click	fire	Right click	left trigger
Space / Enter	A (jump, select)	E / Backspace	B (back)
R / Q	X / Y	C / F	black / white
Left Shift	left stick click	Middle click / V	right stick click
Arrow keys	d-pad	Escape / Tab	Start / Back
F1	PC settings menu	F2	free / take the mouse
F3	frame capture	F4	report a problem

The full list, with the key names settings.toml accepts, is in README-release-windows.txt.

Roadmap

The quality bar is BLACK-XBERecomp, built on the same SDK. The full list is in ROADMAP.md. In short:

1. Play-through QA: play the whole game, file F4 reports, fix as they come.
2. Co-op: player 2's own model, a full co-op play-through, keyboard and mouse for either player.
3. More PC options: SMAA, monitor choice, draw distance, FMV scaling, pause on focus loss, mouse invert, HDR10.
4. Polish: direct mouse aiming on the horse, the HUD kept in proportion on a wide screen, background shader compiles so even the very first run does not stutter.
5. More platforms: macOS, then Android.

How it works

1. The SDK lifts every function in default.xbe to C++ (the generated/ code, never committed: it is derived from the game) and builds it into Darkwatch.dll. A release does this on the player's PC on its first start.
2. The Xbox kernel and the XDK libraries (Direct3D 8, DirectSound, XInput, file system) are replaced by high-level implementations on Windows APIs. config/game.toml names the XDK functions inside the game.
3. Game-specific fixes hook single recompiled functions (darkwatch-hle/src/game/), and the PC menus sit on the SDK's ImGui layer (darkwatch-hle/src/common/).
4. Changes to the SDK itself are kept as one patch, patches/xboxxberecomp-darkwatch.patch, with each change explained in patches/README.md.

Repository layout

darkwatch-hle/          the port (main line)
  src/common/           PC settings menu, bug-report box, game settings
  src/game/             game-specific hooks and fixes
  config/game.toml      XDK symbols found in the game
  tools/                build helpers, QA scripts, release notes
darkwatch/              the older xboxrecomp-based port, kept as a reference (docs/xboxrecomp-port.md)
patches/                changes to the two toolkits, as patches against upstream
references/             reference screenshots: console captures and the port's progress
STATUS.md               current state, findings and open bugs
BRINGUP.md, PLAN.md     bring-up history and decisions

Contributing

Bug reports are welcome. The most useful report is an F4 report folder (zip it) with what you expected to see; see CONTRIBUTING.md. Please do not attach game files or anything extracted from them.

Credits

• XboxXBERecomp by TGP482: the static recompilation SDK this port is built on.
• BLACK-XBERecomp: the quality bar.
• Darkwatch: Darker Edition by linkssy2, another port on the same SDK. Its feature list was the reference for this port's PC features: field of view, widescreen framing, direct mouse aiming, reticle size, cut-scene borders, quit to desktop, the 100 fps script fix, War Train and the Splitter grenades, button prompts for PlayStation and Switch pads, mouse-driven menus, MSAA and the removed sign-in notices. Its game addresses and findings were our leads; each was checked in our own disassembly, and our code and pictures are our own.
• xboxrecomp by sp00nznet: the toolkit behind the reference port (with parts from xemu, LGPL-2.1).
• Dear ImGui, SDL, Zydis, toml++.
• High Moon Studios for making this classic.

Legal

This repository holds only original code, patches and documentation, under the MIT license. It contains no game code, game data or Xbox system software, and building it requires a legally obtained copy of the game. Darkwatch and all related names and marks belong to their respective owners.