Def Jam Vendetta

Def Jam Vendetta, the PlayStation 2 fighter, as a native Windows program, built on your PC from your own disc.

Made by @jcsix on X · jcsix694 on GitHub

The original PlayStation 2 code is translated to C++ with PS2Recomp and compiled on your PC, so your CPU runs the game directly. No emulator. The PS2's graphics chip is redrawn on your graphics card with Vulkan through paraLLEl-GS, and the picture is shown with Vulkan too. No game files come with it: you need your own copy of Def Jam Vendetta (PlayStation 2, USA, SLUS-20639) as an .iso or .chd, and everything made from it stays on your PC.

Contents

• Features
• Screenshots
• Install
• Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings
• Mods
  • The mod kit
  • Wrestlers
  • Arenas
  • Blender plugin
• Controls
• Good to know
• Thanks to
• Licence

Features

Picture

• Up to 16× resolution, scaled to your screen with AMD FSR
• Widescreen matches at 16:9 with more of the arena (menus and movies stay 4:3)
• Sharp 2D: the HUD, text and menus as sharp as the 3D
• High Poly in every match (the PS2 used lower detail models with 3 or 4 fighters)
• Vulkan on your graphics card, in a window or borderless

Playing

• Up to 4 players on controllers, plus the keyboard as any player
• Vibration on Xbox-style controllers
• Camera styles: the game's own, WWF No Mercy or Wrestle Kingdom 2
• Match speed: the game's own pace, WWF No Mercy's slower pace or any speed you pick
• Unlock everything, without touching your save

Easy to use

• A settings program that sets everything up from your disc and updates itself
• Your saves stay as memory card files on your PC

Mods

• New wrestlers and arenas, each with its own place on Choose Fighter and Choose Stage, or in place of the game's own
• Wrestlers with their own models, skins, attires, movesets, animations and voice lines
• Your own animations: moves, intros, victories and taunts, posed frame by frame, with their own sounds and cameras
• Arenas with their own models, textures, lights, crowd sounds and fly-in camera
• Projects: each one has its own mods and its own saves, so the original game and your saves are never touched
• The mod kit comes with the game, with a Blender plugin for models
• Share a project and its mods as one zip

Screenshots

All taken on PC at the default settings: 16×, Sharp 2D, widescreen (the last row also shows the other camera styles).

Install

You need: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) · a graphics card with Vulkan 1.3 (any recent NVIDIA, AMD or Intel Arc card) · about 8 GB of free space · the internet once · your own Def Jam Vendetta disc (USA, SLUS-20639) as an .iso or .chd.

1. Download Def-Jam-Vendetta-Recompiled-Windows.zip (the latest version, also on the releases page).
2. Unzip it somewhere short, like your Desktop or C:\Games. The build tools can't handle very long folder paths.
3. Open Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings.exe.
4. Pick your disc file, or drop it onto the window. It's checked to be the right disc.
5. Press Next: build the game. Microsoft's free C++ build tools are installed first if your PC doesn't have them (allow Windows' prompt once). The build takes 20 to 30 minutes, once, and you can keep using your PC.
6. Choose your settings and press PLAY. The install folder gets a Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled shortcut that starts the game straight away. Two shortcuts go on your desktop too, unless you switched that off: the game, and Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings for the settings.

[!TIP] Windows may say "Windows protected your PC" because the program isn't code-signed yet. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Updating: Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings checks for a new version when it opens and offers it on its Play page. It downloads the new version, swaps in only what changed and rebuilds the game in a few minutes. Your settings and saves are kept. Starting the game itself checks too: when a new version is out, a popup asks Update or Play, once per new version. Turn both checks off under About › Check for updates automatically.

Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings

• Play: what to play, the original game or one of your projects; new projects, copy, rename, delete, export one to share and import one.
• Mods: a project's mods in their load order, its mods folder, and the mod kit.
• Display: window or borderless, which screen, VSync, and widescreen, 4:3 or stretched.
• Graphics: graphics card or CPU, scale 1× to 16×, Sharp 2D, and FSR, smooth or blocky scaling with sharpening.
• Sound: volume and the arena reverb.
• Controls: up to 4 players, each player's controller and vibration, which player the keyboard plays as, and what every button does.
• Gameplay: the camera style in matches, the match speed (Def Jam Vendetta, WWF No Mercy or your own), and Unlock everything.
• About: the version, your game folder and save data in one click, and what it's made with.

Mods

Mods are played in projects. A project is a set of mods with its own saves: the original game never loads mods, and its saves stay as they are.

1. On the Play page, press + New project and give it a name.
2. On the Mods page, press Open the mod kit. It's in the Mod kit folder beside Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings.
3. In the mod kit, make a wrestler or an arena (or import one someone shared), then press Add to project…: it either replaces one of the game's own or gets a new place of its own.
4. Back on the Play page, pick the project and press PLAY.

When two mods change the same thing, the one lower down the Mods page wins. If a project's mods have a problem, the game tells you before it starts, and the Mods page says what's wrong. To share a project with its mods, use Export to share… on the Play page; the other player brings it in with Import….

The mod kit

The mod kit makes the mods. Its first start asks for the name you make mods under, and it links itself to the game it came with.

Wrestlers

A wrestler is up to 3 attires, each with a model, a profile and its select screen pictures. It gets a new slot on Choose Fighter, or takes a game wrestler's place. Everything about it can be your own: its names and size, its stats, its voice and its intro and win lines, its moveset and combos, its animations, its model and its pictures. Or start from any of the game's wrestlers and change only what you want.

Making a wrestler

Moves and animations

Every slot in the moveset holds one of the game's moves or one of your own, and the preview plays it on the wrestler's own model. Your own animations are made in the kit: Create new starts one from any of the game's moves, of every kind the game has (grapples, strikes, running attacks, corner and rope moves, aerials, Blazin' moves, taunts, intros and victories), and everything about it can then be changed:

• Pose: click a body part on the wrestler and drag it. Each change is a key, and the frames between are the game's or filled in for you. Copy, paste and mirror poses, save your own, or start from ready-made poses and any frame of a game animation.
• Timing: add and delete frames, set its speed, and place the moments the game reads: when it hits, when the damage lands, and the windows for the ropes, ring shakes and screen shakes.
• Sounds: the game's sounds at any frame, or copied from one of the game's animations.
• Camera: intros and victories get their own camera, key by key, for each corner of the ring.
• Face and hands: the faces, eyes, lips and hand shapes, frame by frame.
• Before and after: seen joined to what the game plays before and after it, then tried in a real match.

The moveset: every slot the game has, grouped by situation with its buttons, each move played in the preview on the wrestler's own model. The Fight and Combos tabs hold the stats and the combos.

Models and pictures

Adding to a project

Arenas

An arena is its model with its lights, fly-in, sounds and Choose Stage pictures. It gets a new place on Choose Stage, or takes a game arena's place. Start from any of the game's 12 arenas, or from your own model made in Blender, and change what you want:

• Lights: every light the game uses, for the fight, the intros and close-ups and each part of the crowd: its kind, where it sits, how far it reaches, and its colour over time, picked on a colour wheel.
• Fly-in: the camera's path into the arena before a match, key by key on a timeline, with its cuts.
• Sounds: the crowd, the arena's own sounds and the announcer's welcome, picked from the game's recordings.
• Choose Stage: its big picture, thumbnail and name strip, any size.

The arena

Fly-ins and sounds

Models and pictures

Adding to a project

Blender plugin

Wrestlers' and arenas' models are made in Blender, version 5.2 or newer. The kit's Blender plugin page downloads the plugin, which brings the game's models into Blender and exports yours for the kit.

Controls

PS2	In a match	Controller (Xbox layout)	Keyboard
D-pad / left stick	move	D-pad / left stick	Arrow keys / W A S D
✕ Cross	grapple	A	X / Space
○ Circle	run, climb	B	C / Esc
□ Square	strike	X	Z / Numpad 0
△ Triangle		Y	V / Numpad 1
L1 / R1	dodge / block	LB / RB	Q / E
L2 / R2		LT / RT	Left Shift / Right Shift
Right stick	taunt, Blazin'	right stick	I J K L
Start / Select	pause	Menu / View	Enter / Tab

Xbox-style controllers work out of the box, with vibration, and are given to players in the order Windows lists them. PlayStation controllers work through Steam or DS4Windows. The keyboard plays as nobody until you pick a player on the Controls page.

Good to know

• Your saves are memory card files in files\game\mc0 (About › Open save data). Copy that folder to back them up. Each project keeps its own in its folder under files\projects.
• Running slowly? 16× (the default) needs a fairly strong graphics card: try 8× on the Graphics page.
• Preparing graphics: the setup and each update prepare the graphics card's shaders (about 2 minutes), so the game starts quickly. After a graphics driver update the game prepares them again once, with a "Preparing graphics" popup.
• Vibration can also be turned off in the game's own pause menu.
• Camera styles (on the Gameplay page):
  • Def Jam Vendetta: the game's own camera, the default.
  • WWF No Mercy style: looking down on the ring from the side, without swinging round the fighters.
  • Wrestle Kingdom 2 style: the ring seen from a corner, like a diamond. The D-pad and left stick are turned to match it, so up still moves up the screen.
  • Intros, entrances and finishers keep the game's own camera in every style.
• Match speed (on the Gameplay page): Def Jam Vendetta's own pace (the default) or WWF No Mercy's slower pace. Turn on Custom speed to pick any speed from 0.750 to 1.250 with the slider, or type it in. It only changes the fight itself, from the moment it starts until the match is decided. Intros, menus and everything after stay at normal speed, and the match clock follows the chosen speed.
• Unlock everything (on the Gameplay page, off by default): every wrestler, attire, arena and gallery picture for every player, with or without a save. Your save is never changed, and anything you unlock while playing is still saved, so turning it off puts you back where your save is.
• Your settings are in files\settings.toml. Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings writes it, and you can edit it by hand.

The build translates the game's code from your own disc, so you need one here too. This repository has no game files or game code. Everything made from your disc (disc\, game\, generated\) stays on your PC and is ignored by git.

Needs Windows, Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (the "Desktop development with C++" workload), Python 3 and git. Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings needs the .NET 10 SDK.

git clone https://github.com/jcsix694/def-jam-vendetta-recomp
cd def-jam-vendetta-recomp
setup.bat                                        :: the submodules, PS2Recomp + our patch, the recompiler
python tools\prepare_disc.py "D:\path\to\Def Jam Vendetta.chd"    :: or the .iso
recomp.bat                                       :: the game's code → C++ (~2 min)
build-fast.bat                                   :: build it (first time ~12 min)
run.bat                                          :: run it
build-settings.bat                               :: Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings
make-release.bat                                 :: a player's zip in dist\ (nothing is published)

Clone without --recurse-submodules: setup.bat fetches only the parts of paraLLEl-GS's own submodules it needs (a full recursive clone runs into Windows' path-length limit). prepare_disc.py checks it's the right disc, then writes disc\SLUS-20639.iso (the game reads its disc by sector) and game\ (the disc's files). A player's zip has Vendetta Settings, a portable Python and the source with our patches applied. Its first launch runs tools\setup_game.py.

The game reads settings.toml from its folder. A switch set before run.bat wins over the file:

Switch
VENDETTA_SSAA=1/2/4/8/16	samples per pixel on the graphics card (scale)
VENDETTA_GS=cpu	draw on the CPU instead (the PS2's own resolution)
VENDETTA_FILTER=fsr/bilinear/nearest	scaling to the window (filter), and VENDETTA_SHARPEN=0..2 for FSR's sharpening
VENDETTA_GPU=<number or name>	which graphics card, e.g. nvidia
VENDETTA_WIDESCREEN=16:9/21:9/16:10/1	the match's view widened (shape)
VENDETTA_UPSCALE_SPRITES=1/0	Sharp 2D (sharp_2d)
VENDETTA_KEYBOARD=1..4/0	the keyboard's player (keyboard, 0 = nobody)
VENDETTA_SPU_INTERP=linear	the sound chip's voices interpolated linearly instead of the PS2's Gaussian
VENDETTA_CAMERA=vendetta/nomercy/wk2	the camera style (camera)
VENDETTA_UNLOCKALL=1/0	unlock everything (unlock_all)
VENDETTA_MATCH_SPEED=0.75..1.25	the fight's speed (match_speed = vendetta 1.0 or nomercy 0.86, or custom_speed with custom_match_speed)
VENDETTA_PRESENT=opengl	the older OpenGL window instead of the Vulkan one

F1 shows the debug panel. In the repository: config\ (the recompiler's inputs: the function map from Ghidra, Sony library routines bound to the runtime's own, missed function starts), overrides\ (game-specific runtime code), patches\ (our changes to PS2Recomp and paraLLEl-GS), settings-app\ (Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings, Avalonia on .NET 10), third_party\parallel-gs (submodule), tools\ (disc preparation, the VU1 recompiler, release and setup scripts, debugging helpers).

Thanks to

• Def Jam Vendetta by AKI Corporation, published by EA Sports BIG (2003).
• PS2Recomp by ran-j, which translates the PS2 code and runs it.
• paraLLEl-GS by Arntzen Software, the PS2's graphics chip on your graphics card (with Granite).
• raylib, Dear ImGui, FFmpeg, Avalonia and the rest in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2026 jcsix694 (@jcsix on X). Free software under the GNU General Public License version 3 (LICENSE): use it, change it and share it. A changed version you share must come with its source, under the same licence.

It has to be the GPL: PS2Recomp (ran-j, GPL-3.0) is built into the game program, and our changes to it (patches\) are under its licence. Our changes to paraLLEl-GS (patches\parallel-gs-local.diff) are under its LGPL-3.0+. paraLLEl-GS (© Arntzen Software AS) is LGPL-3.0+ and uses Granite (© Hans-Kristian Arntzen, MIT). Both are included as submodules. Every other part and its licence: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

The mod kit in the download's Mod kit folder is a separate program by the same author that comes with the game. Its code isn't in this repository, and this licence doesn't cover it.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts, EA Sports BIG, AKI Corporation or Def Jam Recordings. Def Jam Vendetta and its name, logo and artwork belong to their owners. The banner and Def Jam Vendetta Recompiled Settings' pictures are artwork based on its logo, and the licence doesn't cover them. This repository contains no game code or game files. The screenshots are of the game running on PC. Please don't open issues asking for game files.