split2-recomp

TimeSplitters 2 for the original Xbox, recompiled into a native program for Windows, macOS and Linux (including SteamOS and the Steam Deck). You bring your own copy of the game, and it is built from that copy on your computer. This repository and its releases contain no game code or data.

Video: https://youtu.be/1foP74hN2uw

• Play: download, point it at your disc, play.
• Build it yourself: for developers working on the port.

Play

What you need

• TimeSplitters 2, PAL or USA: a disc image (.iso or .xiso) or a folder with the disc's files in it. Other releases are refused (see Releases of the game).
• 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, a Mac with Apple Silicon (macOS 13 or later), or x86-64 Linux, SteamOS included, with Vulkan drivers.
• About 450 MB of space, plus room for the game's files if you give it a disc image (an image is unpacked once; a folder is used where it is).

Nothing else needs installing: the download carries everything it builds the game with.

Download and start

Download the file for your system from the latest release:

System	File	Start
Windows	split2-<version>-windows-x86_64.zip	Unzip it and run split2.exe
macOS	split2-<version>-macos-arm64.tar.xz	Unpack it, then see macOS below
Linux, SteamOS	split2-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.xz	Unpack it and run ./split2

The first time it starts, it asks for your copy of the game: choose Disc image... or Folder..., or paste a path. It then builds the game, which takes a minute or two (longer on a Steam Deck), and opens the settings. Press Play. After that it opens straight to the settings.

Windows may say it protected your PC, because the release is not signed: choose More info, then Run anyway.

macOS

Move TimeSplitters 2.app to Applications. It is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so before opening it the first time, open Terminal and run

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/TimeSplitters 2.app"

That clears the flag macOS puts on everything downloaded, from the app and the tools it builds the game with. Then open it.

Steam Deck and SteamOS

Unpack the release in desktop mode and run split2 once to build the game. To play from Game Mode, add split2 to Steam (Add a Non-Steam Game) and give the shortcut icon.png from the release folder as its icon.

What works

• The front end, story mode and System Link deathmatch have been played. Challenge and MapMaker have had little testing.
• 60 fps, paced the way the console paced it.
• Widescreen. The camera is widened rather than stretched, and the menus and HUD are laid out for 16:9.
• Rendering at up to 8x the console's 640x480.
• Frame interpolation: 120 or more frames a second on screen while the game itself runs at 60.
• Fullscreen and variable refresh rate (G-SYNC, FreeSync).
• Controllers and keyboard, both rebindable.
• System Link on Windows, over a LAN or the internet. Not on macOS or Linux yet.

Controls

Controllers work as an Xbox pad. The keyboard plays as controller 1:

Xbox	Key
D-pad	Arrows
A, B, X, Y	Z, X, A, S
Start, Back	Enter, Backspace
White, Black	Q, W
Left, right trigger	E, R

Change them in the launcher's Input tab.

While playing:

Key
F9	Show or hide the frame rate
F10	Change the frame cap: adaptive, 60, 30, off
F11	Save a screenshot and a capture of the frame, for bug reports
Alt+Enter	Switch between fullscreen and a window

Settings

In the launcher's Video tab:

Setting	What it does
Resolution	Renders at 1 to 8 times 640x480 and filters down. 2 is much sharper and costs little
Widescreen	16:9, with the wider camera and menus
Texture sharpness	Anisotropic filtering, 1 to 16
Frame rate	Adaptive (the default), 60, 30, or uncapped
Show frame rate	Start with the counter on
Fullscreen	Borderless fullscreen
Variable refresh rate	In fullscreen, an even 60 on a high refresh display. It has to be on in the display's driver too
Frame interpolation	2 shows twice the game's frames, up to 4. 1 is off. Best with variable refresh

The game runs its logic once a frame, so an uncapped frame rate makes it run fast. Use frame interpolation for smoother motion instead.

To keep the front end at 4:3 between bars while the levels are 16:9, add ts2_menus = 43 to the settings file (see Where things are kept).

System Link

Windows only for now. On macOS and Linux the network card is not emulated yet, and the game finds no System Link games.

One player hosts a session and everyone else joins it. Up to 16 copies can be in one session. In the launcher's System Link tab:

• Host a session. The tab shows the address to give the others: your PC's address on your own network, and your internet address once your router answers. With Open the router on (the default), the game asks your router (over UPnP) to forward UDP port 27610 while you host. If your router does not support UPnP, forward that port to your PC yourself.
• Join a session. Enter the host's address, with :port at the end if they do not use 27610. A joining player does not need to open anything.
• Join code. Optional. If the host sets one, only players who enter the same word can join.

Then everyone starts the game and opens System Link from its own menus, as on a console. Any player can host the game there, not only the one who hosts the session. The session ends when its host quits.

Copies of this port can play each other without anything else. To play against xemu or a real console, you also need your console's XboxLANKey in %APPDATA%\xboxrecomp\keys.ini as lan_key = .... The details are in the toolkit's system-link.md.

Where things are kept

The built game, its saves and the logs are in one folder per user:

Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%\xboxrecomp\builds\4553000A\
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/xboxrecomp/builds/4553000A/
Linux	~/.local/share/xboxrecomp/builds/4553000A/

In it, game/UDATA/4553000a/ holds your saves, build.log is the build's log and split2_recomp.log the game's. Your own disc or folder is never written to.

The settings and controls are kept apart from the build:

	Settings	Controls
Windows	%APPDATA%\xboxrecomp\titles\4553000A.conf	%APPDATA%\xboxrecomp\input_bindings.json
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/xboxrecomp/titles/4553000A.conf	~/Library/Application Support/xboxrecomp/input_bindings.json
Linux	~/.config/xboxrecomp/titles/4553000A.conf	~/.config/xboxrecomp/input_bindings.json

Updating

Download the new release and start it. It sees that the game was built by an older release and offers Build again, with your disc remembered. Saves and settings carry over.

Problems

• The disc is refused: it is not one of the releases below. Please open an issue with the title, region and SHA-1 the message shows.
• The build fails: open an issue and attach build.log (see Where things are kept).
• A black window and nothing else: attach split2_recomp.log from the same folder.
• A rendering bug in one place: press F11 there, and attach the .bmp and .d3dcap files it writes beside the game.

Releases of the game

The game is recognised by the SHA-1 of its default.xbe:

Release	default.xbe SHA-1
PAL	2809eb147385723eaa90c425be89ee4db033fc5a
USA (NTSC)	3ec95fe3ae9e7794d83a5b489ad8583f352e0c18

Any other disc, such as the Japanese release or another revision, is refused.

Build it yourself

For working on the port. This builds the same game by hand, from a clone, against the DirectXbox-Recomp toolkit (xboxrecomp/ here): the build translates the game's code to C, then compiles it.

What you need to build

TimeSplitters 2, PAL or USA, extracted from your disc. The build reads default.xbe to tell which release it is, and stops if it is neither.

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit:

• Visual Studio 2022 or 2019 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• CMake 3.20 or newer, on PATH
• Python 3.10 or newer with capstone: py -3 -m pip install capstone
• Git

macOS on Apple Silicon:

• Xcode's command line tools: xcode-select --install
• CMake, Ninja and OpenSSL from Homebrew: brew install cmake ninja openssl@3
• The LunarG Vulkan SDK, installed system-wide. It provides MoltenVK and the shader compiler.
• Python 3.10 or newer with capstone. Homebrew's Python will not install packages globally, so use a virtual environment: python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/recomp && ~/.venvs/recomp/bin/pip install capstone

Linux, x86-64:

• GCC or Clang, CMake 3.20 or newer, Ninja, pkg-config, Git, curl
• Development headers for X11 and Wayland, PulseAudio or PipeWire, OpenSSL, FreeType and fontconfig
• Vulkan drivers (Mesa's RADV, ANV, or NVIDIA's own)
• Python 3.10 or newer with capstone, in a virtual environment as on macOS: python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/recomp && ~/.venvs/recomp/bin/pip install capstone

On Debian or Ubuntu that is

sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build pkg-config git curl python3-venv \
    libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libxss-dev \
    libxfixes-dev libxtst-dev libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev wayland-protocols \
    libegl-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libpulse-dev libasound2-dev libudev-dev \
    libssl-dev libfreetype-dev libfontconfig-dev

SteamOS has no compiler, and its system is read-only, so build inside the Freedesktop SDK, which runs as a Flatpak and has all of the above. It is often installed already, because Flatpak apps such as VS Code use it; if flatpak list does not show org.freedesktop.Sdk 25.08, install it with flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Sdk//25.08. Open a shell in it from Konsole:

flatpak run --filesystem=home --share=network --device=dri \
    --socket=wayland --socket=fallback-x11 --socket=pulseaudio \
    --command=bash org.freedesktop.Sdk//25.08

and do everything below in that shell, venv included. The game it builds also runs outside it, straight from SteamOS.

Build

git clone --recursive https://github.com/phobos665/split2-recomp.git
cd split2-recomp

Copy the extracted disc into a folder called game, so that game/default.xbe exists with data/, music/ and the rest beside it.

On Linux, fetch the shader compiler first (once; distributions do not package it):

bash xboxrecomp/tools/linux/fetch_dxc.sh

Then:

py -3 scripts/build.py                        # Windows
~/.venvs/recomp/bin/python scripts/build.py   # macOS and Linux

The first run translates the game, which takes a few minutes, then compiles it, which takes longer. Later runs only recompile. The program ends up in build/Release/:

	Windows	macOS and Linux
The game	split2_recomp.exe	split2_recomp
Settings window, then the game	split2_recomp_launcher.exe	split2_recomp_launcher

If your extracted games live somewhere else, game can be a link to the folder (ln -s "/path/to/TimeSplitters 2" game), or pass --game DIR to the build and set RECOMP_GAME_DIR when you play.

If you cloned without --recursive, run git submodule update --init --recursive.

Running a build of your own

The controls and settings are the ones in Play. Every setting is also a line in the settings file and an environment variable, which wins over the file:

Setting	File	Environment
Resolution	resolution_scale	RECOMP_RES_SCALE
Widescreen	widescreen	RECOMP_WIDESCREEN
Texture sharpness	anisotropy	RECOMP_ANISO
Frame rate	frame_cap (0 for uncapped)	RECOMP_FPS_CAP
Show frame rate	fps_overlay	RECOMP_FPS_OVERLAY
Fullscreen	fullscreen	RECOMP_FULLSCREEN
Variable refresh rate	vrr	RECOMP_VRR
Frame interpolation	frame_interp	RECOMP_FRAME_INTERP
4:3 front end	ts2_menus = 43	RECOMP_TS2_MENUS=43

The settings and controls files are as in Where things are kept; the controls' format is in xboxrecomp/docs/technical/input-binding.md. What differs from a release:

	Windows	macOS and Linux
Saves	game\UDATA\4553000a\	game/UDATA/4553000a/
Log, when not started from a terminal	build\Release\split2_recomp.log	build/Release/split2_recomp.log

System Link without the launcher:

host: RECOMP_SYSLINK=host [RECOMP_SYSLINK_PORT=27610] [RECOMP_SYSLINK_CODE=word]
join: RECOMP_SYSLINK=join RECOMP_SYSLINK_HOST=81.2.3.4[:port] [RECOMP_SYSLINK_CODE=word]

Other releases of the game

Each release the build accepts has a folder of addresses inside its default.xbe: function entry points, XDK functions and the places this repository's fixes attach to.

Release	Addresses
PAL	config/pal/
USA (NTSC)	config/us/

Another disc needs a folder of its own. The build stops and prints the SHA-1; please open an issue with it.

Updating a clone

git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive
py -3 scripts/build.py --relift

On macOS and Linux, use ~/.venvs/recomp/bin/python in place of py -3. --relift translates the game again, which is needed whenever the toolkit or config/ changes.

Making a release

Pushing a version tag (git tag v1.0 && git push origin v1.0) runs .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds the Windows, macOS and Linux downloads from release/split2.json and attaches them to the tag's GitHub release. No game files are involved. How the downloads work is in the toolkit's self-build-release.md.

Build problems

• "no default.xbe in ...": the disc's files are not in game/.
• Linux, "DXC (the shader compiler) is missing": run bash xboxrecomp/tools/linux/fetch_dxc.sh, then build again.

Legal

You need your own copy of TimeSplitters 2. Do not share the game's files, the built game, a clone's src/recomp/ (it is the game's translated code) or anything in build/. This repository, its releases and xboxrecomp contain no game code or assets.

The code in this repository is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0; see LICENSE. That covers the files committed here, not the game.