The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Sega, 1997) statically recompiled — the game's PowerPC code becomes native C, linked against a Model 3 board.
The board is model3recomp, carried here as a submodule. That repository is title-agnostic: nothing in it knows what game it is running. This repository is the bring-up for one game — the glue, the pipeline, and the notes on what this particular title needs.
That split is the house style across the sp00nznet recomp projects: one core
toolkit per board, one repository per game. virtuacop and daytonausa sit
the same way on top of model2recomp.
Playable. The game boots, runs its whole attract cycle, takes a credit and plays all five stages to the end, aimed and fired with the mouse.
| Boots from the reset vector, runs from RAM as native code | yes |
| I/O board, VBlank, PCI, SCSI DMA to the Real3D | yes |
| Agrees with the interpreter, access for access | yes |
| Tilemaps: scroll, line scroll, layer masks, fades | yes |
| Attract mode, complete — logo, "something has survived", title, rankings, demo | yes |
| Real3D: textured, lit, translucent, filtered | yes |
| Textures from the FIFO and from VROM, all twelve formats | yes |
| Coin, start, light gun aim, trigger, reload | yes |
| Played to the end -- every stage and boss, health bars included | yes |
| Held to the board's 57.524 Hz | yes |
| Menu bar: video, controls, cursor, cheats, multiplayer | yes |
| Gamepad and Sinden light gun | yes |
| Save states, exact across runs | yes |
| Two players over the network — LAN, Tailscale, forwarded port | yes |
| High scores and settings kept between runs | yes |
| In English — the US attract and text from the Japanese board, by region | yes |
| HUD: ammunition counter, RELOAD prompt, pickups, boss target circles and health bars | yes |
| Cheats: infinite health, endless ammo, either player; add credits; start at any stage | yes |
| Two players across two real machines on a LAN, frame-identical | yes |
| Sound — music and effects, matching MAME | yes |
- Some scenes are washed out. A translucent mist layer is drawn too strong in places, the start of the T-Rex encounter among them.
- There are small graphical errors here and there -- stray polygons, the odd wrong texture.
Most of what stood between attract mode and a playable game was in the board. Each fix below is implemented from MAME's Model 3 driver and documentation (BSD-3-Clause) or from measuring the game itself:
| was | is | |
|---|---|---|
Tilemap register 0x20 |
depth and priority nibbles swapped | the title logo and credits roll decode |
| Tilemap scroll | not implemented | scroll, A/A' stencil, colour offsets (fades, lightning) |
| Polygon translucency | drawn opaque | a 40% mist sheet stops hiding the title sequence |
| Culling node siblings | given the node's own transform | a stray cyan shape leaves the demo |
| Per-node texture offset | ignored | models get their own skins |
| VROM texture address | 16-bit units | 32-bit words: the jungle, the village, the trees |
| Texture type byte | ignored | mip-only loads stop overwriting the textures they belong to |
| Texel formats | one of eight | greyscale and alpha formats, tinted by polygon colour |
| Light gun | fixed at the centre | the mouse, on a 147..652 x 79..464 calibration measured from the game's crosshair |
| Viewport priority | drawn in list order | the HUD viewport (priority 3) on top: ammo counter, RELOAD, pickups |
| Serial EEPROM | a toggle that only passed the boot | a real 93C46, where the game keeps its settings and country |
The full bring-up story -- the boot, the stalls, the ROM layout, and the dead ends -- is in docs/technical/bring-up.md.
The lift itself is in good shape, and the evidence is differential rather than
anecdotal: run the same boot through model3recomp's interpreter and through
the recompiled binary, and the two device-access traces agree access for
access for the first 26,440 of them. Where they part is not a disagreement
about any device — it is when the field boundary falls, because the
interpreter paces fields off an instruction count and the runtime paces them
off guest work.
- model3recomp's prerequisites: CMake 3.20+, a C17 compiler, Python 3.9+, optionally SDL2.
- A Lost World romset you dumped or own. None is included here, and none ever will be. Neither is any recompiled output — that is generated on your machine from your dump and is gitignored.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/sp00nznet/lostworld.git
cd lostworld
python tools/build_roms.py /path/to/lostwsga.zip roms/
This works out which chips are the program ROMs by trying interleaves and checking the result against the PowerPC exception vector table, so it proves the layout rather than assuming it:
program EPROMs : epr-19936.20, epr-19937.19, epr-19938.18, epr-19939.17
maps at : 0xFFE00000
reset vector : 0xFFF00100
verified : 7/7 exception vectors
banked CROM : roms/lw_bank.bin (0x4000000 bytes from 16 chips)
VROM : roms/lw_vrom.bin (0x2000000 bytes from 16 chips)
sound : roms/lw_snd.bin (0x80000 bytes from 1 chip)
samples : roms/lw_samples.bin (0x800000 bytes from 2 chips)
If you built the images before sound arrived, run it again: the last two are new.
python tools/lift.py
This boots the machine in an interpreter first, because Model 3 games do not
run from ROM — see docs/technical/bring-up.md.
It writes src/recomp/, which is not committed.
cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release
./build/lostworld
With SDL2 the game runs in a window; without it the build is headless and only writes screenshots. If SDL2 is installed through vcpkg, point CMake at it:
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<vcpkg>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
| Input | Does |
|---|---|
| mouse | aim, with a crosshair (Controls > Cursor to hide it, as on the cabinet) |
| left click, or Space | fire |
| right click, or Left Shift | reload — points off screen and pulls the trigger |
| 5 / 6 | coin 1 / coin 2 |
| 1 / 2 | start 1 / start 2 |
| gamepad | left stick aims, A or RT fires, B or LT reloads, Start, Back for a coin |
| F5 / F7 / F6 | save state / load state / next slot |
| F11, Alt+Enter | fullscreen |
| Tab (held) | run flat out |
| F2 / F3 | test / service |
| Escape | leave fullscreen, or quit |
The menu bar has the rest:
| Menu | |
|---|---|
| File | save and load state, slots 1–9, reset, quit |
| Video | window size, fullscreen, sharp or bilinear, scanlines, 4:3 or square pixels |
| Sound | mute (F9), volume |
| Controls | mouse, gamepad as player 1 or 2, cursor hidden / crosshair / pointer, a white border for a Sinden light gun (run its software in mouse mode, off-screen reload on the right button) |
| Debug | infinite health and endless ammo for either player; add credits; and the cabinet's operator settings, each of which restarts the game: Region (USA by default, Export, Australia, Japan), Difficulty (1-16), Starting life (1-9), Boss action, Attract sound, Free play, and Start at stage (1-5, whatever is picked on the game's own stage select) |
| Multiplayer | host, join, disconnect, input delay |
Settings live in lostworld.ini, high scores and the operator settings in
lostworld.nv, save states in lostworld.<slot>.m3s.
The only dump of this game is the Japanese board, lostwsga, and no
American set has ever surfaced. It doesn't need one: the program carries
every region -- Japan, USA, export, Australia -- and picks its text from a
country byte in its EEPROM settings. The game resets that byte from the
board's region at boot, so the Region setting (Debug menu) sets it again
from then on; changing it restarts the game, as an operator would.
With USA, attract mode gains the American screens (the parental advisory
card, "Winners Don't Use Drugs"), and the subtitles, the how-to-play panel
and the RELOAD prompt are in English.
One machine hosts and plays player 1; the other joins as player 2. Use the Multiplayer menu, or the command line:
./build/lostworld --host 7777
./build/lostworld --join 192.168.1.20:7777 # or a Tailscale name or address
The host's port has to be reachable: on a LAN it is, over Tailscale it is, and across the internet it needs forwarding (TCP). The game restarts for both when they connect -- a session starts at power-on -- and runs in lockstep, so the two machines stay frame-identical; the title bar says so if they ever stop being. Input delay (Multiplayer > Input delay) trades latency for smoothness: 1–2 fields on a LAN, more over distance.
For captures and the build farm, everything is reachable without a person:
M3_NOTHROTTLE=1 runs flat out; M3_COIN_AT / M3_START_AT press coin and
start at a field; M3_FIRE_EVERY=N pulls the trigger; M3_GUN_X / M3_GUN_Y
pin the gun to raw board coordinates (X 150..651, Y 80..465);
M3_NETPLAY=host:PORT or join:ADDR:PORT starts a session;
M3_STATE_SAVE_AT=<field> and M3_STATE_LOAD=<slot> save and load;
M3_SHOT_EVERY=N,DIR and M3_RAM_EVERY=N,DIR write frames and RAM;
M3_CHEATS and M3_OPTIONS set the Debug menu's cheats and region. The same
variables can come from a file, --env FILE, and the ROM images from
another folder, --roms DIR.
Pass a field count to capture a screenshot and exit, which is what the conformance runs do:
./build/lostworld 600 # writes shot.ppm after 600 fields
A recompiled game has no program counter to inspect, so the runtime reports what it can:
| Symptom | What it means |
|---|---|
no function lifted at XXXXXXXX |
an indirect target the lifter missed — collect them and re-run tools/lift.py --entries |
unimplemented <mn> at XXXXXXXX |
an instruction the lifter does not translate |
N device accesses with no field advance |
the guest is polling one register forever; the report names it |
| nothing at all, frames ticking | the guest fell out of lifted code — check M3_TRACE_CALLS=40 |
MIT — see LICENSE.
No ROMs, dumps, recompiled source, symbol maps or anything else derived from the game binary is in this repository, and none ever will be. The tools ship; the output does not.