Vagrant Story decompiled: A lone fan is dutifully working towards the remaster Matsuno's masterpiece deserves, one line of code at a time

The plot of The Pink Panther — the original, not whatever the hell they were doing with Steve Martin in the 2000s — revolves around the biggest diamond anyone's ever seen, with a weirdly animal-shaped flaw at its center. The video game Vagrant Story is that very diamond: a totally singular game, flawed yet irresistible all the same. It's been on my mind lately with the re-release of director Yasumi Matsuno's Final Fantasy Tactics, which has come a couple years after a remaster of one of his other great creations, Tactics Ogre.

I don't know if Square Enix is slowly working through Matsuno's ouvre, but it hasn't given any indication that a remaster of Vagrant Story is in the cards. Indeed, it's one of several incredible games from Square's prolific late '90s period that the company doesn't really acknowledge today.

I'm not sure it ever will — which is why a currently-in-the-works decompilation may be our ticket to playing a version of Vagrant Story that gives it the polish it always deserved, but was simply too far ahead of its time to receive 25 years ago.

But I'm getting ahead of myself! That's the main story this week, but there's been a lot of fun stuff going on around the edge of the emulation world recently, like some lost/unreleased games being dug up from disks unearthed from the backs of literal or proverbial closets. First, here's a PS2 platformer that ain't exactly Jak & Daxter material, but is pretty cool to see make it out into the world nonetheless:

The bigger news, at least for a certain sect of retro gaming + horror fans, is that the Splatterhouse spin-off Splatterworld, a Famicom RPG, seems to have leaked on... 4chan?

Unless it's an extremely elaborate troll job, it's a real Namco game that was canceled before release in 1993. Halloween may be over, but it seems the season got one last treat in before it left. Some hackers and fan translators are already circling the dumped game, so I wouldn't be shocked to see an English patch pop up before too long.

Okay, I think I've resisted long enough. LET'S TALK ABOUT VAGRANT STORY.

The Big Two

1. Un-Follow me now, the Vagrant Story decompilation is the only thing I'm going to tweet about for the next week

There are projects to decompile games — reverse-engineering the entirety of their code, rewriting it, and thus making it natively portable to another system — that I find fascinating and enticing, like the Dinosaur Planet one featured in ROM this year. That's a version of a game that never saw the light of day — regardless of how good it is, it's so cool to be able to just play it on my PC today. There are others that I view more... academically. Neat, noteworthy, but not really games that I'm eager to play.

Vagrant Story could not be more the opposite.

"I picked Vagrant Story not only because it is one of my favorite titles on the PS1, but because it's a flawed masterpiece and ripe for some QoL improvements," says programmer ser-pounce, who is nearly 20% finished scrying the code of Yasumi Matsuno's singular RPG. I feel that truth in my bones.

I didn't fully play Vagrant Story until about 10 years ago, and what I found was a remarkably told story for its time or any time in the history of videogames; an art style that embarrasses many modern games despite being built for a system that bound polygons together with rubber bands seemingly threatening to explode at any moment; and a battle system that I wanted to love but found nigh impenetrable without an encyclopedic FAQ by my side. I roll my eyes at nearly every remaster or remake, wishing game companies would instead focus on creating new work. But Vagrant Story? With a reworked UI and better in-game information guiding players towards discovering how different types of weapons affect the individually targetable body parts of enemies, that combat could sing. The rest of the game already does.

So, yeah, I was pretty excited when I found ser-pounce's Github project for a Vagrant Story decompilation, which he's been working on steadily and quietly, solo, for the last 10 months. While hitting the 100% mark wouldn't guarantee a native PC port or other unofficial "modern" version of Vagrant Story — that's additioanl work, both technical and creative — we both hope that's where the decompilation will lead.

"Without knowing whether it would be possible, the obvious things I would like to address first are the lack of loadouts, and the sluggish loading times for spells and abilities," he says. "In fact I think a lot could be done to reduce menuing which is IMHO Vagrant Story's biggest sin. I love complexity, but having to go three or four menus deep just to change weapon is absurd. I also have a pipe dream for applying HDR (assumes a port for something that supports HDR...) because the lighting in Vagrant Story is phenomenal and careful use of HDR would make it pop just that much more."

Ser-pounce estimates he's spent some 300 hours on the decompilation over the last 10 months to reach that (almost) 20% mark; at that pace, it's going to be a five year project unless someone else steps up to help. I selfishly hope to see that happen, but there are only so many people with the time, skill and inclination to do this sort of work.

"If I only concentrated on the decompilation itself it would probably be much quicker, but there is so much more that goes into the process than just translating binary code to C, that's just the very first step," he says. "You then have to iteratively go over the code to actually understand what it's doing, which in turn allows you to assign meaningful names to variables and functions, and as these propagate through the codebase they lead you to new insight and discoveries, which often results in having to rename or reorganize things again... You also need to write new code to pull apart all the data files, which can often take up just as much time as decompilation itself but isn't factored much in the progress calculations."

How hard is all that, anyway? Well, ser-pounce's experience with programming goes back to learning BASIC on the MSX; he's a professional Windows C# developer with skills in C and C++, too. And even with that background, the process of decompiling game code was still initially baffling. Here's how he breaks down the whole process:

"I had some experience in low-level programming but I was by no means a decompilation/reversing expert before I contributed to [the Symphony of the Night decomp], certainly not MIPS at any rate. There's quite a steep learning curve which is somewhat compounded by the sparse and at times cryptic documentation of the various tools, but the decomp community is incredibly supportive and there's always someone ready with the right answers. I feel like I only really got to grips with the whole ecosystem by setting up my own project, as up until then a lot of the details were a black box.

In a very literal sense, decompilation means to undo the transformations made by the compiler. This is not something that can be trivially solved however, at least not for code that is compiled directly to machine code with little metadata or debugging information left in the final executable. One approach is to analyze individual functions of the binary code to gain an understanding of what they do, and then write code in a higher language that faithfully reproduces this behavior. This is a perfectly valid approach, but it can only ever be an approximation of the compiled code (unless you get particularly lucky, or the differences do not affect the behavior). Often this might not matter, but it can result in inaccuracies that fundamentally alter the experience, and a lot of additional playtesting and debugging if the aim is to have a faithful reimplementation of the product.

Most game decompilations are instead matching decompilations, meaning we use the original toolchain that would have been used on the game, and work on each function one at a time, making small changes until the resulting recompiled machine code is a perfect match for the original game binaries. This gives us the strongest possible guarantee that the higher language code is a close as it can be to the original source code, warts and all. It's a lot more labor-intensive, but it eliminates all doubt on whether the code is faithful or not, and for many of us (probably everyone really...) it's also very satisfying, kind of like solving a huge puzzle where every piece fits together perfectly."

Ser-pounce's simple comparison is that a matching decompilation is like favoring accuracy over speed in emulation: You could get a game running a lot faster, but there are all sorts of little details that you'll only get just right when you strive for perfection.

So far he's made a few small but fun discoveries going through Vagrant Story line-by-line, including a couple bugs and typos. There's also leftover menu code for an easy mode that didn't ship with the game; he hasn't gotten in deep enough yet to know if there's more abandoned in the bowels of the game systems.

Unsurprisingly if you've played Vagrant Story, a lot of the code is dedicated to menus. That's what ser-pounce has spent this year working through, and he predicts the decompilation process may get harder when he reaches the game engine's trickier 3D math. If the sound of that challenge lights a fire in you, you can find the Vagrant Story decompilation on Github and check out the PS1/PS2 Decompilation Discord server. I will patiently wait as long as I have to for another version of this game, but I wouldn't mind if it came sooner than later.

2. Watch Zophar's interview with ZSNES creator zsKnight!

I'll keep this recommendation short, cause you've got an hour and a half video that's well worth watching here! As I wrote on PC Gamer last week, the creator of the groundbreaking Super Nintendo emulator ZSNES has reassumed his online identity after more than two decades and shared the story of creating the emulator, and what came after, for the first time. It's full of great anecdotes, from the technique he pioneered to create "rollback netcode" using save states for online play over dial-up, to what he did with his life after dropping off the net, to the snow effect he casually added to the UI in about an hour's work.

zsKnight didn't really know how big a deal his creation was back in the day, but it ended up getting him a job at EA (funnily enough, the same as NESticle's Icer Addis). He's been out of the emulation scene for years, but I hope the positive reception to the above interview will keep him hanging around, even if it's just to keep reminiscing about the old days. But currently he's working on a WarioWare inspired minigame collection called Retro Endurance 8bit.

Check it out on Steam! It's only $4, and I think it would be Pretty Cool if you fine folks helped get it over the 50 review threshold so it can tick over to "Very Positive." Maybe zsKnight will make Retro Endurance 16bit next.

Patching In

86Box gets FLOPPY DRIVE SOUNDS and more – Retro PC emulator extraordinare 86Box has a penchant for chunky updates, and v5.2 is no exception. It supports new types of emulated joysticks, adds a new search option to the UI, and loads of features for fixes for a bunch of systems. But more importantly, you can now hear your virtual floppy drive:

"We often get requests to add ambient sounds, to make emulated setups sound just like real hardware for a more immersive experience. Domppari took the first step towards that by contributing floppy sounds recorded from actual drives, leveraging our accurate floppy emulation to track the drive’s motor and head activity... Recordings from one 3.5” and two 5.25” drive models are currently available as part of the ROM set."

ShadPS4 changes up its launch(er) – The PS4 emulator's Halloween update is spooky indeed, because it's the last version of ShadPS4 to ship with a Qt-based GUI! After v0.12.0, it's going fully command-line. 😱 Okay, not really — they're just deprecating the old, integrated GUI and instead moving to a separate launcher and emulator core, which I assume will streamline development a bit and should be a nicer experience when games crash, since the UI won't crash with it. You can find both sides of the emulator on their Downloads page. This release also includes a bunch of changes to how the emulator handles memory, though I can't tell you how that's manifesting in game performance. But ShadPS4's progress remains incredibly impressive.

Dolphin gets new, simpler LAN play on one PC – In the works for a few months, this addition to Dolphin's broadband emulation options aims to add a "hassle-free BBA option intended for local play with multiple Dolphin instances running in the same system." Previously it was possible to run several copies of the emulator on one PC and have them all talk to each other for a LAN race of, say, Mario Kart Double Dash, but now it's better!

PCSX2 lets you create desktop shortcuts straight to games – If you tend to use PCSX2 to boot up just a couple games — say your fave Ridge Racer or Silent Hill 3 so you can look at that old guy's face — now you can create a shortcut to launch it directly! It even supports command line arguments (fullscreen, etc.) to customize the shortcut.

Core Report

MAME's Halloween update should've been called MAIM amirite? – MAME v0.282 arrived on the final day of October and is hyping up Hyper Neo Geo 64 audio as "way better than it was a month ago" when it featured in this very newsletter. Sounds (get it) good to me! Some other good advancements for pretty popular systems, too: "Sega Model 2 emulation is noticeably better again, with improved graphics and a number of logic bugs fixed. Speaking of 3D graphics, the severe graphical issues plaguing ARM users playing Namco System 22 games have been corrected."

Taito F2 says sayonara – After working on the Taito F2 arcade core for the MiSTer for the last eight months, developer wickerwaka is signing off work on it with the last batch of compatible games. I don't think anyone's been waiting for these, but if you're into Japanese quiz games, well, score. You've got six of 'em to play now. There's also a quite cute Shinchan minigame collection called Crayon Shinchan Orato Asobo, though!

The MiSTer gets Dandanator'd – Over in the MiSTer Discord, the latest unstable build of the Amstrad core gained support for the Dandanator, a hardware multi-card add-on.

Translation Station

The King of Fighters take the Battle to Paradise – You ever think, dang, this fighting game sure would be more fun if it was more like Mario Party? Let's be honest, who hasn't right? Well, alongside the likes of Super Puzzle Fighter and SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters, King of Fighters got this board game spin-off during the short life of the Neo Geo Pocket Color. There's some really nice chibi pixel art in here. Thanks to prolific Game Boy hacker & colorizer Marc Robledo (and translator xenophile) for putting another NGPC game on my list to play someday; I still need to get around to trying out those card battlers...

Are you Metal enough to be the girl who succeeds God? – The Anime Game Translations team has announced Cowboy Bebop translator Sonicman69 is helping proofread its next project: Fullmetal Alchemist: 3: The Girl Who Succeeds God. The third in Square Enix's series, which followed along with the original anime adaptation, was the only one not to make it out of Japan. I don't think this one's exactly a lost treasure, but it'll be cool to see that trilogy rounded out!

Good pixels

Social media round-up! Been a minute. Let's see those cool shots.

Sign up for Read Only Memo

Videogame emulation news and exclusive interviews, from the aesthetics of razor sharp scanlines to the wild technical challenges of making yesterday's games run on tomorrow's hardware.

Heck, it's free

Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.