Deadly Premonition Recompilation

A native Windows port of Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360, 2010) by static recompilation. No emulator.
60 FPS on the console's own time base · real mouse look · keyboard and PlayStation button prompts · FSR 3 and 2× supersampling · a launcher that updates itself · PAL and USA discs

⬇  Download 1.3.1 for Windows

Release notes · Steam artwork pack · Report a bug · Changelog

by the «Little Bit» team  ·  🇺🇦 MADE IN UKRAINE

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Important

You provide your own legally-owned copy of the game (PAL or USA Xbox 360 disc, as an .iso or extracted files). The release contains the host program only: no default.xex, no game data. See Legal.

At a glance

⏱️ 60 FPS the right way. The logic tick is unlocked from the 30 FPS vblank gate and fed whole ticks with an error accumulator, exactly like the console counts vblanks. Cutscenes stay in sync with the voices. Switchable.	🖱️ Real mouse look. Mouse motion drives the game's own camera code: walking, aiming, driving and cutscene cameras. No stick emulation, no dead zone, no acceleration curve. Sensitivity and Y-invert in the launcher.
⌨️ The prompts speak keyboard. The A / B / X / Y / LB / RB icons become pictures of your keys, generated from your bindings. Or PlayStation glyphs for DualShock / DualSense players.	🎮 Every controller. Xbox, DualShock 4, DualSense (adaptive triggers: weapon click, resistance), any XInput or SDL pad, plus a keyboard layout that mirrors the PC Director's Cut.
🖼️ 2× supersampling on the fast ROV path, AMD FSR 3 + FXAA presenter (or CAS, FSR 1, bilinear), anisotropic filtering, window / monitor / VRR settings.	🚀 A launcher. PlayDeadlyPremonition.exe: every setting in five tabs, English and Ukrainian, first-run .iso installer, one-click updates from GitHub, config self-healing.
🌍 Both regions. The zip holds a recompiled build for the European (PAL) and the USA (NTSC) disc; the launcher picks the right one from your default.xex.	🧩 Modding built in. Every texture is addressable by a stable hash: dump it, edit the PNG, drop it back. That is how the key prompts and the Recompilation title logo are done.
💾 Portable. Unzip anywhere; saves, config and the shader cache live in the game folder. Runs on SSE4.1-era CPUs, no AVX required.	🏆 Achievements are tracked locally with unlock toasts (F7). There is no Xbox Live.

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Quick start

You need: Windows 10 / 11 64-bit · a Direct3D 12 GPU with rasterizer-ordered views (NVIDIA GTX 900+, AMD RX 400+, Intel Arc; recent integrated graphics at 1×) · ~6 GB free for the game data · your Deadly Premonition Xbox 360 disc image or extracted files.

1. Download the latest release and unzip it anywhere outside Program Files.
2. Game data: either start the launcher and let the built-in installer extract your .iso into assets\ (a few minutes, resumable), or copy the extracted disc contents so that default.xex ends up at assets\default.xex.
3. Play: run PlayDeadlyPremonition.exe and press PLAY. The first launch compiles shaders for a minute; later launches are instant. Saves live in userdata\ next to the game.

Updating: the launcher shows an Update available banner and installs the new version in place, keeping your saves and settings (Steam Deck / Proton: unzip by hand, see Known issues).

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What's new in 1.3

1.3.1 (hotfix): sound that stopped a few seconds into some cutscenes and never came back (the morgue, the tree profiling, the lumbermill nightmare, #16) is fixed. The XMA decoder was a pre-May-2026 snapshot of Xenia-canary's; five upstream fixes to the decoder / audio-engine handshake are ported. Verified on the reporter's save. Notes.

• The sky is fixed. The console's HDR scene format keeps only 2 bits of alpha, and the game draws its sky and fog masks into them, so the console-faithful ROV path showed a stair-stepped sky and hard contours on tree crowns and glass. 1.3 keeps a 16-bit shadow alpha next to the EDRAM buffer, validated by a tag so it can never go stale. ROV is the recommended render path now.
• FSR 3 no longer flickers. The upscaler was auto-exposing every frame; whole-image tint changes between frames and brightness flashes on cuts are gone.
• 60 FPS runs on whole ticks like the console (the real fix for #12, and for scripted scenes that ran fast on fractional ticks).
• Doubled sounds and prop swaps at 60 FPS (#17, #18): the game's animation event dispatcher is mapped; an experimental switch is in, off by default. We need your logs, see below.
• Pipeline cache versioning, audio underrun diagnostics, the Steam artwork pack.

Full notes: docs/RELEASE-NOTES-1.3.0.md. Earlier versions: docs/CHANGELOG.md.

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🧪 Help us test

Most of 1.3 is verified on one machine and a handful of saves. A 30-hour game with hundreds of scenes needs more eyes than that, and every report so far has led to a real fix. What helps most:

• Play at 60 FPS and tell us about anything that runs at the wrong speed, doubles a sound, or swaps a prop (the coffee cup, the cigarette jar lid). Set dp_anim_event_log = true in deadlyprem.toml for that session and attach logs\deadlyprem_XXX.log. A second run with dp_anim_event_dedupe = true is even better.
• Cutscene sync: the scene where York meets Emily and George is the reference. In sync or not, with 60 FPS on?
• The sky, tree edges, glass, fog: any scene where the ROV path still shows hard contours or blue polygonal patches on characters. Screenshot plus the scene name.
• FSR 3: frame-to-frame flicker or brightness flashes with fsr3, and whether fsr in the launcher makes it go away.
• Audio loss (#16) is fixed in 1.3.1. If any scene still goes silent, the log from that session (logs\deadlyprem_XXX.log) plus the scene name.
• Steam Deck / AMD integrated graphics: frame rates with ROV vs RTV, 1× vs 2×.
• Crashes: GPU and driver, render path, internal resolution, a screenshot, the newest file in logs\, and whether Internal Resolution 1× or RTV changed anything.

Open an issue with a save file if the problem is scene-specific (userdata\ → the folder for your XUID). "It works" reports with your GPU and settings are welcome too. And if you say yes when the launcher asks to share your shader cache, whoever plays after you gets fewer first-time stutters (what exactly is sent).

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The launcher and in-game keys

PlayDeadlyPremonition.exe shows every setting in five tabs: Graphics (render path, internal resolution, upscaler and sharpness, FXAA, 60 FPS, window, monitor list), Advanced (game language, GPU adapter, texture cache, audio, Steam overlay switch, shader cache sharing, texture dump), Mouse (direct camera control, sensitivity, invert, key stick ramp, auto-shake), Controls (button prompts style, DualSense triggers, every key binding), Debug (log level, PSO policy). It writes deadlyprem.toml next to the game and repairs keys the in-game overlay may drop.

In the game: F4 runtime settings overlay (live changes, Save to config writes them back) · F3 performance overlay · F7 achievements.

Controls

Mirrors the Director's Cut PC keymap. A controller works at the same time. Rebind anything in the launcher (Controls tab); combo syntax in the config: , separates alternatives, + means held together (keybind_a = "E,Space+LMB").

Action	Keyboard / mouse	Pad
Move	W A S D	Left stick
Look	Mouse	Right stick
Change weapon	Mouse wheel	D-pad up / down
Map zoom	Mouse wheel	Right stick up / down
Interact / accept	E	A
Cancel / reload	R	B
Observe	C	Left stick press
Flashlight	F	Y
Run (hold) / cutscene actions	Shift	X
Draw weapon / aim	hold Space	Right trigger
Aim (while weapon drawn)	Mouse (or W A S D)	Left stick
Fire	Space + LMB	A while aiming
Shake the stick (QTE "Get it off!")	tap A D A D rapidly	wiggle the left stick
Hold breath / lock-on	Control	Left trigger
Strafe left / right	Z / X	LB / RB
Pause menu	Enter	Start
Map	M	Back

Steam

Add PlayDeadlyPremonition.exe as a non-Steam game, then apply the Steam artwork pack (also in docs/steam): a 600×900 vertical capsule, a 1920×620 hero banner and a transparent logo, with a README that says where each file goes. Step by step in the FAQ. If starting through Steam gives a black screen or a tinted quarter frame, set Steam Overlay to off in the launcher (Advanced).

Keyboard prompts and texture modding

The game draws its button hints from one small atlas texture. With Mouse & Keyboard Mode on, the launcher paints key caps with your bindings over that atlas, so E Save, R Observe, SHIFT run, SPACE aim follow your keymap. Controls → Button Prompts picks the style: Keyboard, Xbox (original) or PlayStation in three looks (icons by Zacksly, CC BY 3.0). The sets live in prompts\ as plain PNGs, so another controller family is a folder away.

The same mechanism is a modding tool. Every texture the game loads is identified by a hash of its pixels, the same on every PC:

• textures\<hash>.png replaces the texture completely (any size; mipmaps are generated).
• textures\<hash>.overlay.png is composited on top of the original where the PNG is opaque, so you ship only the pixels you changed.
• Launcher → Advanced → Texture Dump writes every texture the game loads to textures\dump\<hash>_<width>x<height>_<format>.png while you play. Turn it off afterwards.

DXT1/3/5 and RGBA8 textures are dumped; float and depth formats are skipped. Code: docs/sdk-patches/new-files/src/graphics/pipeline/texture/replacement.cpp and GenerateKeyPromptOverlay in launcher/src/main.cpp.

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FAQ

Is this an emulator?

No. An emulator runs Xbox 360 instructions on a virtual CPU at runtime. Here the instructions were converted to native x86-64 code once, at build time, by static recompilation: the same technique as N64: Recompiled, Skate 3 Recomp and the author's Silent Hill: Downpour port. The GPU is still translated (Xenos → Direct3D 12) by the ReXGlue runtime, a Xenia-derived host, which is why the settings overlay looks familiar to Xenia users.

How do I add the game to Steam, with proper artwork?

Steam → Games → Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library → Browse... → pick PlayDeadlyPremonition.exe from your DPRecomp folder, and name the entry Deadly Premonition Recompilation. Then download the Steam artwork pack: right-click the game in the library grid → Manage → Set custom artwork → grid.png; on the game's page right-click the banner → Set custom background → hero.png, and right-click the logo area → Set custom logo → logo.png (drag it to the centre). The README inside the pack also has the file-based way (userdata\<id>\config\grid).

Does the USA (NTSC) version work?

Yes. The USA disc ships a different executable, so the zip contains two recompiled builds: deadlyprem.exe for PAL and deadlyprem_usa.exe for USA. The launcher and the installer start the right one from the size of your default.xex; you never have to choose.

Is 60 FPS safe?

It changes the game's time base rather than just doubling the frame rate, so animation, physics and the clock run at normal speed. Since 1.3 the game gets whole logic ticks with an error accumulator, exactly like the console's vblank count: 1, 1, 1, ... and a 2 every few hundred frames, so long cutscenes stay in sync with the audio and scripted scenes never see fractional ticks. Known leftovers: some animation-keyed sounds play twice and a few prop attach events misfire (#17, #18), which we are working on. If something time-related misbehaves, switch it off (Graphics → 60 FPS) and open an issue with the location.

The mouse feels different from a PC shooter.

Mouse motion drives the game's own camera, a spring-damped orbit camera by design: it eases towards where you point and re-centres behind York while you walk. The hook keeps the angle you asked for until the camera gets there and turns the yaw state directly. Tune Camera Hook Sensitivity (radians per pixel) and Hold Before Auto-center in the launcher's Mouse tab; Direct Yaw off gives the game's spring back. Turning Mouse Controls Camera Directly off falls back to stick emulation.

Where are my saves?

userdata\ next to deadlyprem.exe. Saves made with the 1.0 build in Documents\deadlyprem were copied there automatically by 1.1 and later. To back up or move your progress, copy the folder.

The launcher asked to share my shader cache. What is sent, and why?

Why. The runtime translates the game's Xbox 360 shaders and builds Direct3D 12 pipelines the first time it sees them, and that first time costs a stutter. Every pipeline the game has ever needed is remembered in a small storage file that ships pre-warmed with each release. One person cannot reach every scene of a 30-hour game; the players together do.

What. Only the two storage files from userdata\cache\shaders\shareable\: *.xsh (the game's own shader microcode, data from the disc) and *.xpso (pipeline descriptions, a few dozen bytes each). No saves, no settings, no user name, no hardware id. Where to check: one function, MaybeShareShaderCache() in launcher/src/main.cpp, zips the two files and posts them to a project channel; tools/merge_shader_storage.py merges what players sent. The public source carries an empty webhook address; the release build carries the project one.

On / off. The launcher asks once. Later: Advanced → Share Shader Cache. Off means nothing is ever sent.

Does it run on my old CPU?

The build targets the x86-64 baseline plus SSSE3 / SSE4.1: any Intel Core from 2008 or AMD from Bulldozer (2011) onwards. No AVX or AVX2 is required.

Something crashed or looks wrong. What do I do?

Open an issue with: your GPU and driver, whether the render path is ROV or RTV, the internal resolution, a screenshot, and the newest file from logs\. Please try Internal Resolution Scale = 1x and Render Target Path = RTV first and say whether that changed anything.

Can I replace textures / make an HD pack?

Yes. Turn on Texture Dump in the launcher (Advanced), play, pick the PNG from textures\dump\, edit it and save it as textures\<hash>.png (full replacement) or textures\<hash>.overlay.png (only your opaque pixels are applied). Any size works. See Keyboard prompts and texture modding.

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Known issues

• 60 FPS: some animation-keyed sounds play twice and a few prop attach events misfire (#17, #18). Under investigation; an experimental switch is in 1.3.
• Steam Deck / Proton: the launcher's Update button downloads the update but cannot apply it (the updater uses PowerShell). Unzip the release over your folder by hand; a PowerShell-free updater is planned.
• Terrain layer blending shows hard triangle edges while walking and blends correctly when standing still (long-standing, under investigation).
• Some dialogue scenes show light-blue polygonal patches on characters with the ROV path (the scene's fog colour through the composite mask). Under investigation with RenderDoc.
• 2× internal resolution: the game's glow, depth of field and the sun's halo are computed in buffers sized for 1×, so bright edges can show a fine grid and the blur is softer than the original. 1× does not have it.
• Clouds in some outdoor scenes render as flat blotches with hard edges (#10).
• Linux is not supported yet.

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Building from source

Click to expand

1. Install Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools, LLVM/Clang 18+, CMake 3.25+ and Ninja.
2. Build and install the ReXGlue SDK (0.10 nightly, development branch) with the local patches from docs/sdk-patches (a tracked diff plus new files): cmake --preset win-amd64 -DREXGLUE_ENABLE_FIDELITYFX=ON, then build and install the Release and RelWithDebInfo configurations.
3. Put your PAL default.xex into assets\ and run the recompiler: rexglue codegen deadlyprem_manifest.toml (about 10 seconds; the function list and the mid-asm hooks live in deadlyprem_config.toml, the USA build in usa\).
4. Configure with cmake --preset dp-relwithdebinfo (uses CMakeUserPresets.json to point at your SDK install) and build. The default build is the compatibility (SSE4.1) build; -DDP_ENABLE_X86_64_V3=ON enables AVX2.
5. The launcher is a separate CMake project in launcher\ (Visual Studio generator).

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How this is made: a human and an AI

This port is developed with an AI: Claude by Anthropic, through Claude Code. It writes most of the code you see here, the SDK patches, the mid-asm hooks, the launcher, and it is honest to say so. It is not "AI, run this game for me". A recompilation cannot be prompted into existence; it is weeks of the same loop, done by a person:

• Capturing what the game really does in RenderDoc, draw by draw. That is how the sky staircase was traced to 2 bits of alpha, and the rainbow noise to a render target format switch.
• Reading the game's code in Ghidra and in the recompiled listings: the frame limiter constants, the seventeen camera routines, the animation event dispatcher, with the PC port's decompilation as a cross-reference.
• Playing every build. Each change is built, deployed and played; "the mouse feels slow", "Shift freezes York", "the cutscene runs fast" were seen at the keyboard first, and fixes that looked right in code and wrong on screen were thrown away.
• Deciding what ships, what stays default-off, what is rolled back.

The AI reads thousands of lines of runtime and game listings faster than a person can, ports patches between projects, keeps the launcher, docs and both regional builds consistent, and writes the tedious parts without getting tired. The human brings the game, the tools, the eyes and the judgement. Pull requests are read by a person, tested on a real machine, and credited to you.

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Credits and thanks

First of all, to the people who made the game. Deadly Premonition is the work of Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro and the team at Access Games, published by Rising Star Games, Ignition Entertainment and Marvelous. Greenvale, York, Zach, the coffee, the rain: none of this exists without them. This project is a way of keeping that game playable, and it is made with respect for their work. Please buy the game.

• «Little Bit» — the team behind the port: the recompilation, the launcher, the SDK fixes. Made in Ukraine.
• ehw — the 60 FPS patch (originally for Xenia), the starting point of the 60 FPS path.
• Alexbeav — the first-run disc image installer (contributed to DownpourRecomp, ported here).
• ReXGlue and Xenia — the runtime this port stands on; XenonRecomp and the recompilation projects that showed the way.
• DPfix by Peter Thoman — invaluable notes on how the game renders.
• Zacksly — PS5 Button Icons and Controls, the PlayStation prompt icons (CC BY 3.0, resized, otherwise unmodified; prompts/LICENSE-zacksly.txt).
• The testers. SilentHeII, Crowley9, Dominus41, DexgamingX, GradiusHead and everyone who filed an issue, sent a save, a log or a DebugView capture: the black screen under Steam recording, the audio desync, the doubled sounds, the coffee cup, the morgue, the Steam Deck updater. Each one became a fix or is on its way to one.

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Legal

This repository contains no game code, assets or data. You must own Deadly Premonition for Xbox 360 and provide your own disc image or extracted files. Deadly Premonition is © Access Games / Rising Star Games / Marvelous. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them, Microsoft, Valve, or the ReXGlue authors.