v0.2.0 — The Sims (Xbox) recompiled: 175-244 fps

Live mode 175-244 fps, up from 33-58. The title thread was asleep 45% of every frame: the SDK's guest dispatcher parked every wait on one process-wide condition variable and every signal woke all waiters, so a semaphore-based guest lock broadcast thousands of times a second. Targeted wakeups (SDK 2ea4a5c) cut voluntary context switches from 1400-2900 per thread per frame to 16-32.

Also in this release:

• Linux audio verified end to end — the earlier 'silent' finding was XBE_MUTE=1 in every benchmark, not a defect
• Camera zoom rescaled by the call rate (sub_00011ED0 stepped per call, so it ran 4x fast at the new frame rate). Confirmed on the shipped binary: the same 1.5 s zoom-out hold reaches the same camera position at 60 fps and uncapped. SIMS1_NO_ZOOMRATE=1 compares
• F1 settings and F2 performance panels, with the game's own typed-word cheats
• Picture rect measured: 640x432 at y=24, no overscan bars
• Game speed real time at any frame rate

Bring your own disc: drop the disc image into assets/ beside the executable as a .iso. That is the whole setup — the exe mounts it as the console's disc and streams each file as the game asks for it, so nothing is unpacked. (The 14 extracted disc files work too, if you already have them.)

Windows, since this was cut (2026-10-21): this zip's own Sims1.exe was run on real Windows 11 (26200) on an RTX 5060 Ti. It mounts the .iso out of assets\, boots through the title screen to the attract demo at 60 fps on Direct3D 12, sounds through XAudio2 (mixer peak 0.46; the process's Windows audio session meters continuously non-zero), and a DualSense (PS5) pad works: SDL opens it by name and its analogue triggers reach the title's own XInputGetState.

Known limits: Hor+ ultrawide widens the frame target but the title's own aspect path is unanalysed; full-screen movies lose 24 rows to the measured picture crop.

The Sims v0.1.0 - playable household on Linux and Windows

The Sims — v0.1.0

The original Xbox The Sims (USA), statically recompiled to native PC code. No emulator, no Wine on Linux: the retail XBE's own code is translated to C++ at build time and runs against a host runtime — Vulkan + SDL3 on Linux, Direct3D 12 + XAudio2 on Windows.

This is the first release on XDK 5233, a build the SDK shipped no signatures for. The 5233 signature set, the CDevice data layout (26 of 31 offsets differ from 5558's) and 128 symbol proofs in this repo are this port's own work.

What works

• Boots from your own disc and reaches a playable household in live mode — unattended, every run tried (docs/playtest.md). 1100–2200 draws a frame in live mode.
• 60 fps with vsync on a 3440x1440 display (radv); 59–60 without.
• Intro movies, title, loading, main menu, Get a Life, Create a Sim, tutorial dialogs, live mode.
• F1 settings panel — display mode, resolution, aspect, ultrawide, vsync, frame cap, HDR (Windows), render scale, anisotropic filtering, key bindings, and this game's own typed-word cheats (SIMS, FISH EYE, GARGAMEL confirmed visually; see docs/cheats.md) as toggle rows. F2 performance panel with the frame-time graph.
• Keyboard + mouse as controller port 0, and SDL3 gamepads.
• Real-time game speed at any frame rate: the engine's 60th-of-a-second quantiser is rebuilt on the host clock — 1.000 simulated seconds per real second at 60, 144 and uncapped (docs/frame-rate.md).
• The measured picture rect (640x432 at y=24 — the game draws it that way inside its 640x480 back buffer), so no overscan bars (docs/picture-rect.md).

Known gaps

• Audio is silent on Linux (SDL path). The Windows build is audible under Wine (XAudio2), which localises the defect to the SDL audio path.
• The Windows exe cross-compiles and runs under Wine but has not been run on real Windows.
• No gamepad has been plugged into the test machine.
• Full-screen movies are trimmed by the picture crop's 24 rows (they were overscan on a TV too).

Downloads

File	Platform
Sims1-linux-x64.tar.zst	Linux x86-64 (Vulkan, SDL3; glslang/SPIRV libs bundled)
Sims1-win64.zip	Windows x64 (Direct3D 12, XAudio2)

Bring your own disc: extract the 14 files from your USA copy's root into the assets/ folder beside the executable (tools/xiso_extract.py in the repo does it from an image). Nothing EA/Maxis-owned is distributed here.