侍道2 — Way of the Samurai 2, native

The 2004 PS2 cult classic, decompiled and running as a real Linux and Windows program. No emulator. No interpreter. Widescreen, any resolution, any frame rate.

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Ten days in Amahara. A hungry ronin, a mute girl, a rice ball, three thugs — and then every choice is yours. Way of the Samurai 2 never left the PlayStation 2.

This project takes the game's MIPS machine code apart function by function, rewrites it as C++, and runs it natively: the game's own logic, its own data, its own scripts — on your CPU, through OpenGL and SDL2.

You can play it from the title screen to the staff roll.

What runs

The whole story — all 102 story and shop scripts run on a reimplementation of the game's scripting VM, through to the endings.	Sword fighting — combos, guards, parries, the fight AI, experience and learned techniques, swords that wear down and break.
A living town — ten areas, day and night, people going about their business on the game's own task scripts.	Everything around it — shops, the inn, the blacksmith, your home, the sword safe, items, accessories, saving and loading.

Also in: the opening and ending movies, voiced dialogue with lip movement and facial expressions, music and sound effects, the sky, water, fog, shadows, blood, sparks and blade trails, and controller support.

Mods, built in

A mod loader ships with four mods switched on:

• Widescreen — the 3D view opens out to the sides. 16:9, 21:9, whatever shape your window is.
• Resolution — draw at 1080p, 4K, or as many lines as your window has, instead of the PS2's 448.
• FPS unlock — 60, 120, 144 pictures a second. The game still thinks at 30; everything in between is interpolated.
• Modern lighting — real sun shadows from characters, objects and the town itself, ambient occlusion, bloom, god rays and a colour grade. At night the lanterns light the street, light the people walking past, and cast their soft shadows on the ground — with moths flitting round them.
  • Weather — rain that rolls in by itself (or on F8): wet streets with puddles that catch the sky, splashes, eaves dripping after the shower, dry under the roofs, a grey sky.
  • Bump mapping on stone, wood, tiles and clothes, and an optional un-baked mode that relights the whole town from its sun instead of its painted-in light.
  • Wind and dust — the game's own gusts made visible: motes in the air, dust swept down the street (none in the rain).
  • Moods — a look of its own for dawn, evening, night, indoors and the rain, blended in as they come.
  • Characters in shade — people take the light painted into the ground under their feet, so they darken in a shaded corner or away from a lantern as the town around them does.

Each is a folder with an .ini you can edit — or, with a controller, open Settings → R1 "Enhancements" in the game's own menu (picture shape, resolution, frame rate, HD textures, lighting, shadows, weather, dust, bloom, moods; saved when you leave it), or press F5 for every slider; Save keeps them. Writing your own takes one header: replace any game file by dropping it in a folder, or load code that reads and writes the game's memory every frame. The guide is mods/README.md. HD texture packs made for PCSX2 work as they are: put the pack's .dds files in a mod's textures/ folder. F9 switches the pack off and on while you play.

A level editor is built in too: press F2 in the world to move, add and remove objects, paint where one can walk, and save the result as a mod.

Photo mode: F7 freezes the world, hides the HUD and hands you a free camera with field of view, roll and depth of field; F12 saves the picture.

Sprint: with your sword away, click the left stick (L3) while running.

Scripts from source: the story, shops and opening are scripts in the game's own language, and every one is on the disc with its source. Edit a .sol, drop it in a mod, and the game compiles it when it loads it. tools/solc and tools/solrun compile and run scripts without the game (lib/sol).

It runs lighter than it looks: everything out of view or beyond the fog is skipped before it reaches the graphics card.

Play it

You need your own copy of the game — the NTSC-U disc, SLUS-208.93. Nothing from the disc is in this repository.

Prebuilt: download the Linux or Windows package from Releases, unpack it, and start wots2 / wots2.exe. The first time it asks for your disc image. Each package has a README.txt.

From source (Linux):

# 1. Dependencies (Debian / Ubuntu / Pop!_OS)
sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build libsdl2-dev libgl-dev libarchive-dev ffmpeg

# 2. Build
cmake -B build -G Ninja && ninja -C build

# 3. Go — hand it your disc image the first time
./build/wots2 "Way of the Samurai 2.iso"

The launcher unpacks the game's files once (into extracted/, about 1.5 GB) and starts the game; after that plain ./build/wots2 is enough. It takes an .iso, or a .zip / .7z / .rar / .tar.* holding the image or the files themselves. Start it without an argument and it asks for the file in a window.

ffmpeg is only needed for the movies. F11 toggles fullscreen. Saves go in wots2_card/.

Controls

	Controller	Keyboard
Run / walk	Left stick or d-pad	Arrows / T G F H
Sprint (sword away)	Press L3 while running (off when you let go of the stick)	C
Jump, confirm	Cross (bottom)	Z
Talk	Circle (right)	X
Attack, pick up	Square (left)	A
Attack, cancel	Triangle (top)	S
Draw / sheathe	L1	Q
Guard (+ Square: kick)	R1	W
Camera	Right stick (R3: back behind)	J L / I K (V: back behind)
Pause menu	Start	Enter

Key
F2	Level editor
F3	Modern lighting off / on, to compare
F4	Print where you are (for bug reports)
F5	Graphics panel: FPS, lighting, weather, dust — live, with Save
F6	FPS unlock off / on
F7	Photo mode (F12 saves the picture)
F8	Weather: clear → rain → by itself
F9	HD texture pack off / on
F11	Fullscreen

How it works

 SLUS_208.93 (MIPS R5900)                    this repository
┌─────────────────────────┐      ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│ game + engine code      │ ───▶ │ src/game, src/engine   decompiled C++ │
│ data, vtables, tables   │ ───▶ │ loaded at its real PS2 addresses      │
│ GS · SPU2 · pad · disc  │ ───▶ │ src/hal   OpenGL · SDL2 audio · input │
└─────────────────────────┘      └──────────────────────────────────────┘

• Pure decompilation. Each function is read out of Ghidra and the disassembly and rewritten by hand. There is no MIPS interpreter anywhere.

• Guest memory. The game's data is mapped at the addresses it had on the PS2, so decompiled code and original data tables agree without translation. Calls through vtables go through a registry of address → native function.

• Hardware boundary. The Graphics Synthesizer becomes an OpenGL renderer that records each frame as a draw list — which is what lets the same frame be replayed wider, sharper, and in between.

• The script language is a library of its own. lib/sol is the game's script VM and its compiler, with no game code in it. The compiler's output is identical, byte for byte, to all 164 compiled scripts on the disc that come with source.

About 2,000 of the binary's ~4,600 functions are decompiled. Much of the rest is Sony's libraries and debug screens the game never shows.

Honest status

It plays start to finish, and automated runs take whole games through to an ending without a crash. It is not finished:

• Map and model drawing and lighting are native approximations, not the original's VU1 code. It looks right; it is not bit-exact.
• It has not been compared side by side with the original on real hardware or PCSX2 for timing, sound and feel.
• Windows builds have been tested under Wine, not yet on a real Windows machine. macOS is not done yet.

Found something that looks or plays wrong? That's the most useful thing you can report.

Poking around

tools/ghidra_decomp.sh 0x1C3AC0        # Ghidra pseudocode for a function
tools/volume.py list                   # what's in VOLUME.DAT
tools/sx.py src CTX/Opening            # read an event script
tools/task.py dump shop.bin            # read an NPC's task script
WOTS2_MODEL_VIEW=shujinko_01 ./build/wots2 extracted    # model viewer
WOTS2_MAP_VIEW=numata        ./build/wots2 extracted    # fly through a map

Legal

This repository contains none of the game's binaries, assets or disc contents. It is an independent, non-commercial preservation and research project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Acquire, Spike or Capcom. Way of the Samurai is a trademark of its owners. You must own the game to use this.