Castlevania: Belmont's Curse (PPSA35399)

[mrfelek]

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Title

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse (PPSA35399)

Content version tested

01.000.000

AnyPS5 commit

main 8f9240f (2026-10-15)

System tested

Ubuntu 26.10, GCC 15.3.0, RTX 3080 Ti (NVIDIA 615.71.09), Linux native, SDL audio via PipeWire.

Furthest point

In game

What is shown

The title is Unity IL2CPP. Main menu, then a new game, then gameplay: a dialogue scene (Trevor and Rose on a boat in front of a burning city, with the dialogue box). About 3.8 FPS (window title), with the GPU about 30% utilized. No local changes were needed, and no other pull requests. The stop of earlier revisions of this report, a DIM 2D depth-compare sample on a 1x1 1D T# (I first described it wrongly as 3D), does not happen on this main: it is the case #5456 fixes, and #5456 is merged (as is #5375).

The first screen after the logos is black with only the skip prompt (the cinematic video is not drawn); holding Circle skips it. On a keyboard Circle is the C key (Enter or Space is Cross; the full default mapping is in core/libs/prx/libScePad/include/InputMapping.hpp).

Current blocker

Speed. A perf profile of 30 s in game (18,947 samples) puts 83% of the samples on one thread, the packet worker, and 60% of all time inside the AGC driver. Of that thread's time: graphics draw and record 21%, allocator 14%, shader-resource evaluator 10%, RecompileResult and descriptor-binding build 8%, kernel 6%, write-watch 4.5%. There is no single hot function. The GPU is mostly idle, the same pattern as Diablo II (#5146), where the committer pipeline in #1202 gave about +51%; this title is a second one that should benefit from it.

The cinematic video not being drawn is not investigated.

How it was run

• Unity titles need the modules in Media/Modules and Media/Plugins unwrapped and converted with the executable: relinker --registry --module-dir Media/Modules --module-dir Media/Plugins src/eboot.elf app.elf (12 modules, including the 95 MB Il2cppUserAssemblies.prx). Without that the executable stops at load with Il2cppUserAssemblies.prx: cannot open shared object file.
• libSceNpCppWebApi.prx is in this dump's sce_module/, so no other dump is needed.
• The .guest.prx files go next to the originals, as the relinker writes them.
• APS5_HOST_IMPORT_MIB=16384 SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pipewire ./app.elf

Not tested: audio output quality; PSN features; save data beyond the first mount.

AI-assisted; the runs are from my machine.