Unofficial PC recompilation · v0.14.0

Evil Dead: Hail to the King

The 2000 Dreamcast game, running natively on Windows and Linux. The game's own program is translated to C and runs on a rebuilt Dreamcast: graphics, sound, controllers and memory card.

Download v0.14.0 Source code

No game data is included. You build it from your own disc image.

What's in it

Modern displaysFullscreen at your monitor's resolution, window or stretch, sharp or smooth textures, sharpened menus.
ControlsKeyboard or any modern controller, plugged in before you start.
Your keysRebind every Dreamcast button to the keys you want in the options window.
Button promptsDreamcast, Xbox, PlayStation or Switch icons in the menus.
Save slotsThe memory card is emulated; the save screens talk about slots, not VMUs and blocks.
ExtrasRead all 17 documents, watch the 56 Sofdec cutscenes and turn 35 character models in their rest pose, all straight from your disc.
Model capturePress F8 in game to save the 3D models on screen as OBJ files with textures.

Build it on Windows

You need your own copy of the game as a Redump-style .cue + .bin set (USA release), Windows 10 or 11, and about 1.5 GB of space.

  1. Download the latest release and unzip it.
  2. Double-click build.bat and pick your disc's .cue if it asks.
  3. Wait 15–30 minutes the first time: it downloads the build tools from their official pages, reads the program from your disc, translates and compiles it.
  4. Open the new pc-build folder and start launcher.bat.

On Linux:

./build.sh "/path/to/Evil Dead - Hail to the King (USA).cue"

How it works

A recompiler finds the roughly 6,000 functions in the game's SH-4 program and translates every instruction to C. The runtime stands in for the Dreamcast hardware: the PowerVR2 graphics chip (drawn with OpenGL), the AICA sound chip and its ARM7 CPU, the controller bus and memory card, the GD-ROM drive reading your disc image, and the BIOS. The technical notes cover the details and what was learned about the game along the way, including its model and texture formats.

Still to do: the HD font and logo, sound reverb, save slots 3–8, the AVI movies, model animations, Android.