Crash Bandicoot 2 Recompiled — v0.9.3

Windows x64 · 60 FPS game updates, optional assists, and a pause menu you
can use with the mouse

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

60 FPS game updates

Settings → Performance → 60 FPS game updates. Off by default.

This is the game itself running twice as often, not a smoothing filter. Crash 2
waits for two screen refreshes before drawing each frame; this removes the
second wait, so the game updates 60 times a second instead of 30.

World speed does not change. The engine already measures how long each frame
took and scales movement by it — that is how the original copes when a busy
scene drops to 20 FPS — and this reuses that mechanism rather than inventing
one.

It will not run at 60 everywhere, and that is deliberate. A PlayStation
frame has a fixed amount of time in it, and Crash 2 was written to fill two of
them. Where the work does not fit, running "as fast as possible" produces a
rate no display divides evenly, which looks worse than 30 does. So the game
watches itself: if a scene cannot keep almost every frame on the faster
schedule, it hands that scene back its original 30 and tries again later. You
should see either a clean 60 or a clean 30, not something ragged in between.

Expect quieter areas to hold 60 and busy ones to sit at 30. It is still
experimental: world movement, scripts, cutscenes and audio have not been
checked across the whole game.

Optional assists, on their own page

Settings → Cheats. All off by default.

No damage permits everything the gold mask permits — it simply does not run
out after fifteen seconds. It does not stop falls, crushing or drowning,
and it does not make enemies die on contact.

These change saved progression: lives and masks are written to your memory card
as you play, so switching an assist off stops further writes but cannot undo
what is already saved. Copy your userdata folder first if that matters to
you. Both assists switch themselves off during the attract-mode demos.

The same two rows are in the Home menu and apply immediately for that session;
a choice made in the launcher applies on the next launch.

The pause menu takes the mouse

Point at a row to select it, left-click to use it, right-click to step an
option backwards, and the wheel adjusts whatever the pointer is over. The
keyboard and controller work exactly as before.

Game aspect in the pause menu also gained 14:9 — the ratio the launcher
defaults to for this game. Without it you could change aspect from the pause
menu and then have no way to get back to the one you started in.

Fixes

• A stall that could abort the game a few seconds after loading a save state
  while an assist was enabled.
• A performance fault in the emulated CPU timing that cost roughly eleven
  frames a second whenever the 60 FPS mode was on.

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.