Crash Bandicoot 2 Recompiled — v0.9.2

Windows x64 · a display release: the picture fills your screen properly now

Work in progress. The game is playable from start to finish. There are
still minor sound and graphical issues, so treat this as a preview rather than
a finished release.

This is Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back translated into native code
and run directly, rather than emulated.

Before you start

You need your own disc image. This package contains no game data: no game
code, artwork, audio or disc content. You supply a .cue with its .bin, or a
.chd, and the game is built on your machine from it. Nothing is uploaded and
your disc is only ever read.

The build targets the North American release, serial SCUS-94154.

Nothing to install. The compiler is included. You do not need Visual
Studio, cmake, Python or anything else.

Unpack somewhere with a short, plain English path. C:\Games\Crash2 is
ideal. This matters more than it sounds. Two Windows limits bite otherwise,
and the launcher checks for both and tells you before wasting your time:

• A folder path with non-English characters will not build. If your Windows
  username has an accent or a non-Latin character, do not unpack into your
  Desktop or Documents.
• A deeply nested folder exceeds the Windows path limit during the build.

Getting started

1. Run Crash2Launcher\Crash2Launcher.exe
2. Setup → choose your disc image → Build the game
3. Play

Your saves and settings live in userdata\. Copy that folder into a future
version and your progress comes with it.

While playing

What is in this release

Scenery no longer pops in at the edges of the screen

This is the big one, and it needs a little explaining.

Crash 2 was made for a 4:3 television. Its levels were built to look right in
that shape, and the scenery simply stops a little way past the edge of it —
there was never any reason to build more. The usual way to make an old game
widescreen is to widen the camera's view, and that is what previous versions
did. It works, but it points the camera at ground the level was never given, so
you would see walls, crates and platforms appear and disappear along the left
and right edges as you moved.

This release fills your screen a different way. The view is widened only
slightly — far less than before, so it stays well inside the ground the level
actually has — and the remaining gap to a 16:9 screen is closed by the picture
itself rather than by showing more world.

The result: the image fills the screen edge to edge, nothing is cut off, and
the popping is largely gone.

The picture was being stretched vertically

Separately, and affecting every previous version: the Enhanced and
Performance presets were making everything about 15% too tall.

Crash 2 leaves a band of unused black scanlines at the top and bottom of its
picture. Those presets trimmed that band away, correctly — but the trimmed
picture was then stretched back to the full height, so Crash and everything
else came out slightly elongated. It was subtle enough to look normal until you
compared the two side by side.

Fixed. If you have been playing on Enhanced, the game will look a little
different now, and this is why: it is correct now and it was not before.

New controls over how the picture fits your screen

On Settings → Image, under Framing:

Zoom and Stretch are two different ways to solve the same problem, and they mix
freely. The defaults use mostly Stretch, because on this game it costs about 2%
of distortion — which you will not see — where filling the screen by Zoom alone
would cost about a sixth of the picture.

Also new: Screen shape, under Output. The shape the game renders in and
the shape of your window are now separate settings. That is what lets the game
draw a 4:3-ish picture into a 16:9 window in the first place.

A new aspect ratio, and a preset that keeps the old behaviour

Gameplay aspect now offers 14:9 alongside 4:3 and 16:9. It is the middle
setting the new default uses: wider than the original, but not so wide that it
runs off the end of the level.

If you preferred the old, genuinely wider view and did not mind the popping, it
is still there — choose the Widescreen (wider view) preset.

Fewer large objects vanishing

A separate, older bug: the game decides whether an object is on screen by
checking the eight corners of a box around it, and it treats the object as
hidden when all eight corners are off screen. A large object close to the
camera can fill the screen while having every corner outside it, and those were
being hidden. They are now kept.

Known issues

• Minor sound and graphical glitches remain. This is a preview.
• Some scenery can still pop at the very edge in the widest settings. If it
  bothers you, lower Gameplay aspect to 14:9 or 4:3; the default already
  does.
• A folder path with non-English characters will not build. The launcher
  detects it and tells you to move the folder. Fixing the underlying tool is
  planned.
• A deeply nested folder will not build, for the same practical reason.
  Same detection, same advice.
• Windows will warn on first run. "Windows protected your PC" appears
  because the package is not code-signed. Click More info, then Run
  anyway. Your antivirus may also object to the bundled C compiler; if it
  quarantines anything under toolchain\, allow it or the build will fail
  partway through.
• Only the North American disc is tested. Other regions may work; nothing
  is promised.

Legal

An unofficial, non-commercial fan project. Not affiliated with, authorised or
endorsed by Activision, Naughty Dog or Sony Interactive Entertainment. Crash
Bandicoot is a trademark of Activision Publishing, Inc.

No game code, artwork, audio or disc data is distributed. You provide your own
disc image and the game is built locally from it.

Licences are in LICENSES\:

• psxrecomp, the recompiler and runtime — PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0.
  Free to use and share for any non-commercial purpose. Selling it, or
  bundling it with anything commercial, is not permitted.
• OpenBIOS (PCSX-Redux) — MIT. Included, so no PlayStation BIOS is needed.
• SDL3 — zlib.
• Qt / PySide6 — LGPL v3, shipped as replaceable files.
• The bundled toolchain — LLVM/clang under Apache 2.0 with LLVM exceptions,
  plus MinGW-w64, CMake, Ninja and Python. Notices in LICENSES\toolchain\.

Dumping a disc you own for personal use is permitted in some countries and not
in others. Check where you live.