v1.0.0 - AOT Shaders

V1.0.0

Astral Chain Recomp 1.0.0 is the first stable release. Its headline feature is ahead-of-time shader compilation: instead of hitching the first time the game meets a new shader, the installer now compiles every shader during setup - from your own game files - so the action runs smoothly from the very first launch.

v0.3.0 - 60FPS + v1.0.1 support

This version supports 60fps during gameplay, locked 30 FPS during cutscenes and the port requires the update 1.0.1 to run from now. Your current savefile should be safe when upgrading. 60FPS is enabled by default and can be toggled off in settings (escape key in game)

I tested the release as much as I can please open an issue if anything goes wrong.

v0.2.2 - Tentacles

Astral Chain Recomp 0.2.2

Fix the "tentacles" visual bug when you kill an enemy. The port has no known broken visual effects anymore, if you experience something broken please open an issue

Dissolve effects

The port ignored the NVN alpha test and treated every alpha comparison as
"always pass". A shader that writes a binary alpha for the alpha test — the
enemy-death dissolve is one — therefore drew its whole ribbon mesh opaque, which
is where the large black "tentacles" in the sky came from.

The alpha function and reference now travel with the pipeline state into the
shader variant, and the translator discards the fragments that fail the
comparison. The dissolve cuts its geometry as on the Switch instead of drawing it.

Every shader is translated again once after updating, because the translator
identity changed.

v0.2.1 - Resolution Scaling Part 2

Sharper 1440p and 2160p

• 1.33x (1440p): the native picture keeps its detail and gets RCAS sharpening only.
• 2x (2160p): a 4K picture on a 1440p screen is reduced by an area average, then
  sharpened by RCAS. The old bilinear blit threw much of the supersampling away.
• Texture filtering: the new default auto doubles the game's anisotropic level at 2x.
• Depth targets scale with the rest, so effects using a depth buffer keep full resolution.

v0.2.0 - Resolution Scaling Part 1

Astral Chain Recomp 0.2.0

Play in 1440p or 2160p

Astral Chain's engine stops at 1080p. This release makes the port render larger
without changing the game: the picture is prepared at a higher resolution, and both
the 3D scene and the interface are shown at that size.

• Open the menu, go to the Screen tab, set 3D render scale, then restart the game. The choices are 1.33x (1440p), 1.5x (1620p) and 2x (2160p).
• Or edit astralchain.ini: ssaa = 1.333 for 1440p, ssaa = 2 for 2160p.
• At the default 1080p game size, 1.33x renders 2560x1440 and 2x renders 3840x2160.
• The HUD, menus and dialogues are rendered at the chosen size too, not stretched from 1080p.

v0.1.2 - RAM / VRAM optimisations

Astral Chain Recomp 0.1.2 — much lower memory use

This build cuts the memory the port needs for textures, on integrated and discrete GPUs alike. In the police HQ on an Intel Arc iGPU, video memory went from about 10.9 GB to 4.3 GB, and the process's RAM working set from 11.1 GB to 4.5 GB. On a discrete card the same changes apply to real video memory; there the game's own memory mirror (about 2 GB) is the next item we will look at.

What changed

• Textures take a quarter of the video memory. The port now decodes the game's ASTC textures to BC3 instead of uncompressed RGBA8. Most desktop GPUs do not support ASTC natively, so this applies almost everywhere. At 1080p the difference is subtle: slightly softer gradients and a little less precision in normal maps; UI and text are unaffected. If you want the uncompressed images back, set astc_bc = 0 in astralchain.ini, or turn off Compress ASTC to BC3 in the Advanced tab.
• A budget on texture memory. The port keeps a ceiling on the texture images it holds (an eighth of your GPU budget, between 512 MiB and 2 GiB) and lets go of the ones you have not seen for a while, reloading them when the game asks for them again. Set it with tex_cache_mb in the ini; a negative value turns the budget off. This is what stops memory from growing without bound in large areas.
• Less wasted video memory. The Vulkan allocator used to reserve 256 MiB blocks for images of a few MiB; it now uses 8 MiB blocks. That alone accounts for about 2 GB in the HQ.

Installing

1. Download Astral Chain-Setup-0.1.2-windows.zip and extract it.
2. Run Astral Chain-Setup.exe, point it at your keys file and your copy of the game (base game 1.0.0), and choose the install folder.
3. If you already have an install from an earlier version, select its folder: the setup updates it in place and keeps your saves, settings and mods.

SHA-256: 6D668CDE99C2AB8B15F2E50B5BC9ACBE28DBF9299BFF0F3538E0DA3769782776

Known limitations

• The game still runs at its native 30 fps.
• Shaders are compiled the first time they are used, so expect some stutter in the first minutes until the cache warms up.
• Windows x64 only, and the base game 1.0.0 is required (updates are not supported).

Hotfix: 0.1.1

Fixes the setup refusing genuine 1.0.0 base games, and turns a version mismatch into a choice instead of a wall.

What changed

• The version is decided by the code modules (main, sdk, rtld). A differing main.npdm is now a warning, not
  an error: the game checks the fields it uses at start, so nothing else changes.
• The exe accepts the files you installed. The build bakes the SHA-256 of each ExeFS file into astralchain.exe
  and refuses anything that changed. It now bakes the hashes of your extracted files instead of the reference dump,
  which is what made a differing main.npdm install and then fail at boot.
• Continue anyway. If the files still do not match (another dump, a modified game), the window offers a button that
  runs the same setup with the check reported as a warning. The game may not run, or may crash; that is your call.
  Command line: --accept-unknown-version.

If you already installed with 0.1.0 and it worked, you do not need this build.

V0.1.0

Astral Chain Recomp 0.1.0

A native Windows build of Astral Chain (Nintendo Switch), made by recompiling the game's own code to x86-64 and
translating its NVN graphics calls to Vulkan. The setup carries no game data and no code derived from the game: it
extracts the files from your own copy, lifts the game's code to C, and builds astralchain.exe on your machine.

This is the first release. It plays from the title screen through the story, with the game's audio and save data.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, x86-64 with SSE4.2 (an AVX2/FMA build is used automatically when the CPU has them)
• A Vulkan 1.3 graphics card
• Your own copy of the base game, version 1.0.0 (XCI or NSP), and your prod.keys
• About 14 GB for the installed folder plus 4 GB of temporary files

The 1.0.1 update is not supported.

Installing

1. Download Astral Chain-Setup-0.1.0-windows.zip, unpack it anywhere and start Astral Chain-Setup.exe.
2. Pick the base game file, your prod.keys, the game language and the folder to install into.
3. Wait: extraction, lifting and compiling take about a minute on a fast CPU, a few minutes on a slow one.
4. Play astralchain.exe from the install folder. The setup and the source file can then be deleted.

Windows warns about the unsigned exe on first start (SmartScreen): choose More info → Run anyway.

What works

• Native code: the game's own logic, running as a Windows program
• Graphics through Vulkan, with FSR 1 upscaling, custom resolutions and a 1062p mode, 16x anisotropic filtering
• The game's audio, music, sound effects and voices
• Save data, stored in the install folder
• In-game settings menu (F1) and performance overlay (F10)
• Setup and in-game menu in English, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese
• Keyboard, mouse and gamepad, with hot-plug, rumble, gyro and remapping; Xbox button prompts
• Mods and data cheats in the emulator formats