The Simpsons Game — Recompiled v0.0.4.1

launcher: let the ISO browser reach Windows drive letters

Browse roots were home + Unix mount points only, so a Windows player
with the ISO on any drive outside their user profile could never
select it. Probe drive letters per call so USB drives plugged in
while the launcher is open appear too.

The Simpsons Game — Recompiled v0.0.4

The Performance Release

The first release since the repository went public — and the largest set of performance work so far. Same game, same visuals, substantially faster.

Quick start — Windows: unzip, run simpsons-launcher.exe, click Install from ISO, then Play.
Quick start — Linux / Steam Deck: extract, run Play.sh.

Performance

• Real 60 FPS. The game shipped with its own hardcoded "wait 2 vblanks between frames" — a 30 FPS lock that ignored every setting. It's now patched at the instruction level (matching the community-verified 60 FPS patch for this title), so the launcher's Framerate setting actually works. 60 is well-tested; 90/120 remain experimental.
• ~50% faster in the heaviest measured scene. The recompiled game code now builds at full optimization with a modern CPU baseline (-O3 + x86-64-v3) — previously the hottest code in the project was compiled at a lower optimization level than everything around it. Combined with the engine fixes below, the main-menu draw-storm scene went from a locked ~32 FPS to ~48+ FPS in like-for-like measurement.
• Engine hot-path fixes: removed a per-draw-call cache that the code's own upstream history documents as a measured loss (it ran on every draw); eliminated redundant global-lock acquisitions on two hot paths (guest thread-sync calls, and the memory-fault handler that fires tens of thousands of times during level streaming); fixed the audio worker's wait loop busy-spinning under load.
• Tear-free presentation. Main-menu flicker traced to a tearing-permitted swapchain default; the presenter now prefers a tear-free mode with the same latency.
• Audio fixes: startup failure on systems without a JACK server fixed (SDL now targets PipeWire/PulseAudio/ALSA directly); wait-loop fix above also reduces audio crunch under load.

Launcher

• Update checker fixed: it now offers an update only when a release is actually newer than what you're running (previously any version mismatch nagged forever).
• Steam Deck Gaming Mode: launcher opens as a real app window instead of Steam's built-in browser, and the game no longer black-screens when switching to it (both were one root cause: the sandboxed Steam Linux Runtime container).
• Settings dropdowns fixed inside the launcher's embedded window.

Under the hood (for contributors)

• Built-in per-frame performance logging (perf_log_csv) — fps, frame times, draw calls, GPU stalls, cache hit rates.
• Live FPS overlay on F3.
• A benchmark harness (tools/bench/): A/B performance runs with saved baselines, GPU shader-cost ranking, a pixel-diff rendering-verification harness, and a scripted PGO pipeline.
• The complete map of the game's D3D command-writer method table (simpsons/re/d3d_method_table.md) — all 73 rendering operations identified, the foundation for the native-renderer roadmap in the README.
• Optional ThinLTO builds (-DREXGLUE_ENABLE_LTO=ON) and opt-in draw-submission telemetry (-DSIMPSONS_DRAW_TELEMETRY=ON).

Known issues

Unchanged from the README: the "instant pop-in" patch remains dangerous on Steam Deck hardware (workaround documented), audio can still crunch under very heavy load (a deeper fix is in development), and 90/120 FPS modes are experimental.

You must own the game. As always, no game content is included — the launcher installs from your own legally-owned ISO.

The Simpsons Game — Recompiled v0.0.3

First-bring-up build of the recompiled game for Windows (D3D12) and Linux (Vulkan).

You must own The Simpsons Game (Xbox 360). No game content is included —
install it from your own legally-owned ISO.

Windows: unzip, run simpsons-launcher.exe, click Install from ISO, then Play.

⚠️ Do not enable the "Instant character pop-in" patch on Steam Deck / Van Gogh
APU class GPUs — it crashes on level load (a kernel BSOD on Windows).

The Simpsons Game — Recompiled v0.0.2

First-bring-up build of the recompiled game for Windows (D3D12) and Linux (Vulkan).

You must own The Simpsons Game (Xbox 360). No game content is included —
install it from your own legally-owned ISO.

Windows: unzip, run simpsons-launcher.exe, click Install from ISO, then Play.

⚠️ Do not enable the "Instant character pop-in" patch on Steam Deck / Van Gogh
APU class GPUs — it crashes on level load (a kernel BSOD on Windows).

The Simpsons Game — Recompiled v0.0.1

First-bring-up build of the recompiled game for Windows (D3D12) and Linux (Vulkan).

You must own The Simpsons Game (Xbox 360). No game content is included —
install it from your own legally-owned ISO.

Windows: unzip, run simpsons-launcher.exe, click Install from ISO, then Play.

⚠️ Do not enable the "Instant character pop-in" patch on Steam Deck / Van Gogh
APU class GPUs — it crashes on level load (a kernel BSOD on Windows).