Payne Recompiled

An unofficial native recompilation of the Xbox version of Max Payne (2001) for Windows. It is not an emulator: the game's code was translated to C and compiled into a normal Windows program, with keyboard and mouse controls in the style of the PC release, 60 fps, widescreen, high resolutions and subtitles.

This project does not include any Max Payne game files. To play, you need an image of your own legally obtained Xbox disc.

How do I play?

1. Download PayneRecompiled-Windows.zip from the releases page.
2. Extract it to a folder you control with a short path, such as C:\Games\PayneRecompiled. Avoid Program Files: the game writes its saves and settings beside itself.
3. Run payne_recompiled_launcher.exe.
4. Click SELECT ISO and choose your Max Payne disc image. You can also drag the .iso onto payne_recompiled_launcher.exe.
5. Wait while the launcher copies the game files into a game folder next to it. This takes a few minutes and needs about 5.7 GB of free space. It only happens once, and your image is left unchanged.
6. Choose your settings and click PLAY.

After that, just run the launcher and press PLAY. You can also run payne_recompiled.exe directly to skip the settings window.

Which disc?

The release is built for the European disc, Max Payne (Europe) (En,Fr,Es,It) (default.xbe SHA-1 49874fff1defd2b7923a1d61fd7bb1f41d206aa5). Both plain XISO images (extract-xiso, xdvdfs) and full redump images work. If you select a different version, the launcher warns you, and the game will most likely not start. Other versions need their own build; see Building from source.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse are the main controls. An Xbox or other gamepad also works, using the original console layout.

Action	Key
Move	W A S D
Look and aim	Mouse
Shoot	Left mouse button
Bullet time	Right mouse button
Shootdodge	Left Shift
Jump	Space
Crouch	Left Ctrl or C
Use, confirm	E or Enter
Reload	R
Painkillers	Tab
Next / previous weapon	Mouse wheel, or 1 to 4, or the arrow keys
Left trigger (console)	F
Pause	P
Menu (Resume Game, Save)	Esc
Back in menus	Backspace or Tab

Hold Alt to free the mouse cursor, for example to click on another window in windowed mode. Mouse sensitivity can be set with the RECOMP_MOUSE_AIM_SENS environment variable (default 1.0). Set RECOMP_MOUSE_INVERT=1 for inverted look.

You can change any key in the launcher's INPUT tab, or by editing xboxrecomp\input_bindings.json.

Hotkey	Does
Alt+Enter	switch between fullscreen and windowed
F9	show or hide the frame rate
F10	change the frame cap: adaptive, 60, 30, off
F11	save a screenshot next to the game, for bug reports

Launcher settings

Setting	What it does
Resolution	Renders the game larger than the console (up to 8x, 5120x3840) and scales it down. 2x or 3x looks sharp at 1080p.
Widescreen	16:9 with a wider camera, so you see more at the sides. Menus and the graphic novel stay at 4:3.
Texture sharpness	Anisotropic filtering, up to 16x.
Frame rate	60 fps (default), 30, adaptive (paced like the console) or uncapped.
Show frame rate	Show the counter from the start.
Fullscreen	Borderless fullscreen.
Variable refresh rate	Even pacing on G-SYNC and FreeSync displays.
Frame interpolation	Draws extra frames between the game's own.
Developer mode	See below.

Developer mode

Turn on Developer mode in the launcher to unlock the game's built-in developer menu. The main menu gets a [developer] entry with:

• Preview Levels: start any chapter of any part directly
• God Mode
• Get All Weapons
• Get Bullet Time
• Display FPS

The menus are moved with the movement keys (W/S). Developer mode was a debug feature of the original game, so some of it may be unstable. Turn it off in the launcher to go back to the normal game.

Subtitles

Spoken dialogue is shown as subtitles, in the style of Max Payne 2: the graphic novel narration, the cutscenes and the radio and TV. The game itself has no subtitles, so these are matched to the audio as it plays. Lines shouted by enemies in combat are not subtitled. To turn subtitles off, set RECOMP_SUBTITLES=0, or add subtitles = 0 to xboxrecomp\titles\54540003.conf.

Where things are kept

Everything stays in the folder you extracted, so you can move or copy it.

• Saves: game\UDATA\54540003\
• Settings: xboxrecomp\titles\54540003.conf (written by the launcher)
• Controls: xboxrecomp\input_bindings.json
• Log: payne_recompiled.log, for bug reports

Status

All 66 levels load and play: each was started from the level select and played briefly with scripted input. Walking, shooting, bullet time, shootdodging, painkillers and saving work.

Known issues:

• The heaviest levels (parts of the Manor, the Docks, the Rooftops and the Drug Trip) can drop to 35 to 55 fps on slower CPUs. The rest of the game holds 60.
• The game has not been played through from start to finish in one go yet.
• Only the European disc is supported.
• In developer mode, a thin grey bar can appear at the right edge of the screen. That bar is drawn by the game itself, not caused by a rendering fault.

Please report problems on the issues page, with your payne_recompiled.log attached.

Building from source

You need:

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
• Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• CMake 3.20 or newer
• Python 3.10 or newer, with capstone: py -3 -m pip install capstone
• Git

git clone --recursive https://github.com/endmgs/payne-recompiled.git
cd payne-recompiled

Extract your disc into a folder named game, so that game\default.xbe exists (the launcher built from this repository can do that for you, or use extract-xiso). Then:

py -3 scripts\build.py
py -3 scripts\package.py

build.py translates the game into C (src\recomp\gen\, a few minutes the first time) and compiles it (15 to 40 minutes, because of link-time optimisation). package.py makes PayneRecompiled-Windows.zip. The generated code comes from your copy of the game and is never committed.

config\seeds.json and config\xdk_symbols.json hold addresses in one specific default.xbe. A different region or revision needs its own copies.

The subtitles are made from the game's own audio with faster-whisper. See scripts\subtitles\README.md.

Credits

• phobos665/payne-recomp, the recompilation this project is forked from.
• phobos665/xboxrecomp, the Xbox static recompilation toolkit it runs on (GPL-3.0; see xboxrecomp\NOTICE for the work it includes).
• xemu, whose Xbox research the toolkit relies on.

Max Payne is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive Software. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Remedy Entertainment, Rockstar Games or Take-Two.