Toy Story Racer Recompiled

Static recompilation of Disney•Pixar Toy Story Racer (PlayStation: the European Es, It, Nl disc SLES-03398, the American disc SLUS-01214 and the European Fr, De disc SLES-03397 — any one of them is enough) built on psxrecomp and recomp-ui. The game runs as native code on your PC, compiled from your own disc, with a widescreen mod, a native 3D renderer for the tracks and a set of fixes on top.

Players	2 (split screen)
Region	PAL (Europe) and NTSC (USA)
Publisher	Disney Interactive
Year	2001

What this adds

All enhancements live in the bundled Toy Story Racer Widescreen mod package (launcher → Mods) and can be switched off.

On a first start the game is set up the way it is meant to be played: widescreen with the native renderer on, the window opening in the shape of your monitor, 960-line internal resolution with bilinear filtering. Every one of them can be changed in the launcher (Settings and Mods); an existing install keeps its own choices.

Three discs, one game — the setup takes whichever of your discs you select (European Es, It, Nl, American, or European Fr, De) and builds that version; every further disc you set up adds its version:

• Version (Display group, at the top): PAL 50 Hz plays a European program, NTSC 60 Hz the American one, with races at 60 frames per second. Play starts the chosen version with the same launcher settings, mod options and memory cards; if its disc is not set up yet, the disc setup opens instead.
• Set up another disc: at the next Play the disc setup opens, to add another of your discs. A version set up later starts with the settings of the one you were using.
• Texts and voices in every language in every version: each program carries the texts of all six languages, and the character voices of every disc you set up (English from the American disc, Italian, Spanish and Dutch from the Es, It, Nl disc, French and German from the Fr, De disc) are copied into the other versions' disc folders, so the Quick start language picks both. A language whose disc you do not have uses English voices if you have them, else the disc's own.
• One memory card for all: every version reads and writes the same save (the versions only name it differently), so a game saved in one continues in the others.

Nothing of a disc you do not set up is ever used: every file comes from your own discs.

The disc as files — at the first start the game splits your disc image into the tsr_data folder of the install: every data file as a normal file, the music, voices and videos with their full sectors, and the few sectors no file owns. Every sector is rebuilt and compared with the image before the folder is used. From then on everything — boot, loads, music, voices, videos, and Generate & rebuild — comes from that folder: the image is not read any more, and is not needed to play. tsr_data holds the game's data: never share it.

Instant loading (Fixes group, on by default) — the game's file loads are answered at once from the folder instead of waiting for the emulated CD drive to seek and read; the music and voices still stream in real time, as on the console. The framework's CD Speed and Fast Loading packages are left out of this build: they are not needed, and Fast Loading would speed the game itself up while the music streams.

Instant memory card (Fixes group, on by default) — checking the card, loading and saving are instant. The console's BIOS moves one 128-byte sector every two frames, so checking the card took about 8 seconds and every save a few more; the game's card calls (Sony's standard card and file functions) are now done at once on the card file, saves/card1.mcd. The card file is written exactly as the console's BIOS writes it — the same directory, blocks and data — so it stays a normal memory card image for any emulator.

Quick start (Fixes group, on by default) — the game starts at the language choice, without the Activision, Disney Interactive and Traveller's Tales logo videos (Logo videos: Show plays them). Language: English, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Español or Nederlands starts straight at the title screen in that language (texts and voices), without the language choice and the copyright notice; Ask (default on the European programs) keeps the game's own choice.

Widescreen (fit to window, 16:9, 21:9 or 32:9) — a real wider field of view, not a stretched picture; Fit to window first opens in the shape of your monitor:

• tracks and objects are drawn all the way to the screen edges, in one and two player races; the cloud sky of the title and level select fills the width too;
• the race HUD is anchored to the corners, and so are the prompts of the menus, level select, track preview and pause screen (the character select prompts keep following the characters' heads);
• Track draw distance: the original hides scenery outside the 4:3 view; Extended doubles the draw distance, Full (default) also ignores the 4:3 visibility lists, so nothing pops in at the sides.

Native scenery renderer (always on) — all the 3D is drawn by the PC instead of the emulated PlayStation GPU: the track scenery, the karts and the characters, the menus' 3D scenes and the title logo, and the effects (smoke and sparks, shadows, kart aerials, pick-up crates). No wobbling textures or jittering polygons, correct depth between pieces (a kart's far wheels and aerial no longer show through it), no polygons cut at the 4:3 edges. The emulated GPU is left with the 2D HUD, menus and videos. Textures keep their exact place on every polygon however the camera cuts it (no sliding, no seams, straight lines on uneven floors), and the race camera and the pre-race flight are worked out without the game's rounding: no small jolts.

50 fps races — the PAL game runs at 25 fps; races can run at 50 fps (one player by default, two players optional on a fast PC). Game speed and music are unchanged. The NTSC version runs at 30 fps and its races at 60 fps.

HUD size — 100 / 85 / 75 / 65 % (default 85 %): the low-resolution HUD and menu art is drawn smaller so it looks sharper next to the high-resolution game.

Track preview camera — while the camera flies over the track before a race, Select holds it in place; then L1 / R1 move it back and forth along its path, L2 / R2 four times as fast. Select again lets it fly on.

Other options: CPU overclock (races only; keeps two-player races at full rate), near-polygon pool size, frame smoothing, race progress bar position, VSync on high-refresh monitors.

Fixes

• Character voices no longer stall the menus while they load.
• Music changes no longer hitch.
• Pier: a corrupted sea-grid record on the European disc crashed the original GPU; broken packets are now dropped instead of halting the game.
• Pick-up crates no longer float in mid-air in wide views (a 32-bit overflow in the game's object position maths).
• Scenery no longer vanishes during jumps and falls (Skate Park) or at long range (fences and roofs in the Neighbourhood), and the sky of the outdoor tracks reaches the edges and the top of a 32:9 view.
• The star-shaped scene transition covers the whole 32:9 view.
• Lamp halos are round (no faint square around them) and no longer shine through walls.
• Two-player end-of-race camera cuts no longer flash shrunken prompts and stale margins for a frame.
• Track seen through a doorway at the sides of a wide view is drawn at once (Toy Store finish), and rooms whose doorway is above or below the view no longer vanish (Car Park pillar, barrier and wall with the camera high).
• Rooms seen through a doorway keep the scenery above and below it (the far wall of the house's upstairs corridor).
• No more one-frame gaps in the track ahead (Car Park landings) and no more one-frame 4:3 picture when pressing X or Triangle in the character select.
• Snow falls across the whole wide view.
• Faster widescreen rendering: the side margins are drawn in one pass per frame and the scenery's transparent faces in batches (Toy Store worst case: GPU load about 77% -> 32% on an RTX 4070 at 32:9, 6x).
• Repairs the track data of dumps with read errors (see below).

Plus everything psxrecomp provides: high internal resolution, texture filtering, save states, controller rumble.

Online play (experimental) — two players on two PCs, each with a full-screen view of their own kart (Online play, Fixes group, on by default):

• On the main menu press SELECT: Square hosts (the game waits on the two-player character select), Circle joins: a window lists the games found on your PC's networks (LAN, Radmin, Hamachi...) or takes an IP address and port. Then the two-player character and track select, as in a local two-player game, with all the tracks.
• The host opens port 27450, TCP and UDP, on the router, unless both players use a VPN such as Radmin VPN.
• Both PCs need the same disc version (e.g. both USA) and the same mod options that change the game (frame rate, CPU overclock, track detail, polygon pool, music change, widescreen, instant loading, instant memory card); the connection is refused with the name of the option that differs. Picture options (resolution, aspect, HUD size...) may differ.
• Needs a reasonably fast PC on both sides. The two games advance together, so the slower PC sets the pace for both: if one of them cannot run a two-player race at full speed, both slow down. A two-player race at 60 fps (NTSC, 50 fps (also 2 players)) needs a recent CPU; an older one (e.g. an i7-3770) drops to about 45 fps in heavy parts. Frame rate in races = 50 fps (1 player) on both PCs (two-player races at the game's original rate) halves the load.
• A log of the connection (tsr_online.log, next to the game) records every 10 s the round trip, the waits and each PC's time per frame.
• How it works: input lockstep. The host sends its game state once when the other player joins (both PCs then load the same state); after that only the buttons travel, every frame, by UDP with the last 16 frames in each packet (and a TCP copy), a few frames ahead, the margin adapting to the round trip and to lost packets. A checksum of the game's memory is compared every two seconds.

Faster frames — the game's frame wait loop is now skipped by the runtime's idle skip instead of being run at the overclocked rate: about a third less CPU work per frame, the same on every PC.

Another disc in the launcher — picking the disc of another version in a game's launcher (Browse For Disc) now starts that version, or opens the disc setup to add it, instead of reporting a failed verification.

Disc dumps

The American (SLUS-01214) and the European Fr, De (SLES-03397) discs are accepted as clean Redump dumps.

Two dumps of the European disc (SLES-03398) are accepted. The first is clean: every sector's error-detection code checks out. The second, the dump this project was first built from, has 78 misread sectors: about 45 values in ten track files (3E 3E where the disc has 80 3F / 10 3F), which break textures and geometry on Skate Park, Pier, Car Lot, Cinema and Neighbourhood, plus a few music, voice and video sectors.

The Track data fix feature (Fixes group, on by default) restores those track values while the disc is read. It is a list of guarded patches in the mod manifest: no game data is shipped, and on a clean dump it changes nothing. If your dump is rejected, make a fresh one with redumper.

The runtime can also read any file placed under disc_override/ next to the game executable instead of the one on the disc (same path, e.g. disc_override/COURSE_B/PIER.AXE), for testing replacement data.

How to play

1. Download the latest zip from Releases and extract it into a new folder.
2. Run ToyStoryRacer_Recompiled.exe. Nothing else needs installing: on first use the launcher downloads its own portable toolchain (CMake, Clang and Python).
3. Select your own disc (.cue/.bin of SLES-03398, SLUS-01214 or SLES-03397) and follow the Generate & rebuild wizard: that disc's version is compiled on your PC.
4. Press Play: widescreen and the native renderer are already on; the launcher's Mods page has every option.
5. Other discs: in Mods set Set up another disc (or a Version not set up yet) and press Play — the disc setup opens; select the disc and Generate & rebuild again.

The download contains no game data and no Sony BIOS; OpenBIOS (MIT-licensed) is used when you do not provide your own.

Framework changes

The game needs a few additions to psxrecomp (a linked-list hook for the menu prompts, disc file overrides, CD/XA loading, the disc as files, function and kernel-call hooks for the instant loading and memory card, a disc-folder hook and a disc-serial hook for the three-disc setup, GPU packet safety, CPU overclock, and for the online play a per-frame pad hook, save state transfer, hidden/remapped drawing areas and a foreign-disc hook, and more). They ship inside the release zip and are kept here as patches/psxrecomp-toystoryracer.patch against the pinned psxrecomp submodule commit.

Legal

You must own the original game. Disc images and files taken from discs are gitignored and must never be committed. Retail BIOS dumps are not redistributed; OpenBIOS is used for Generate unless you supply your own SCPH locally.

App icon: the Toy Story Racer logo (assets/psxrecomp.ico / .png); Windows builds embed it via APP_ICON. Launcher box art: launcher_assets/img/ (see BOXART_SOURCE.txt).

Quick start (dev)

git submodule update --init --recursive
git -C psxrecomp apply --ignore-whitespace ../patches/psxrecomp-toystoryracer.patch
./psxrecomp/tools/ci/build_emitters.sh
python3 psxrecomp/psxrecomp_cli.py generate \
  --config game.toml --project-root . --disc disc/<your>.cue
cmake -S . -B build-release -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build-release --target psx-runtime

Release kit (setup host, no Sony BIOS). The other discs' projects (versions/USA, versions/FrDe) are made by tools/make_disc_project.py --kit from each disc's probe in disc/probes/<serial>/ (local only, never shipped):

cmake -S . -B build-setup -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DPSXRECOMP_FORCE_SETUP_HOST=ON -DPSXRECOMP_BIOS_STEMS=OpenBIOS
cmake --build build-setup --target psx-runtime
RELEASE_VERSION=x.y.z bash scripts/package_setup_release.sh build-setup windows-x64

Zip prefix for CI artifacts: tsr.

Symbols

Progressive map: symbols.toml → python3 tools/sync_symbols.py → psx_symbols.h (PSX_FN_*). See psxrecomp/docs/SYMBOLS.md.

Framework pins

Submodule gitlinks (psxrecomp, optional recomp-ui, nested recomp-net) are authoritative. framework_pins.txt is an optional scaffold snapshot. Bump submodules deliberately and refresh the patch when you do.