Black 2006 Recomp

An experimental Windows recompilation of the original Xbox release of BLACK (2006), built with XboxRecomp. It includes a Direct3D 11 renderer, keyboard and mouse controls, XInput controller support, video settings, a PC launcher, and native audio output. Movies are enabled by default. The Windows build can also run on x86_64 Linux through Wine/Proton; see Linux setup.

The starter release includes BLACK PC Launcher.exe for one-click play and BLACK PC Settings.exe for settings. Supply your own original Xbox files in game/, then open Build BLACK.cmd on Windows or Build BLACK.sh on Linux with the build prerequisites installed. After that, open the play launcher to use your saved settings.

Linux can generate and compile the complete game without a Windows installation; see Linux build and setup. Use Play BLACK.sh or BLACK Settings.sh with Wine/Proton. Install Linux Shortcuts.sh creates clickable desktop entries. The public starter contains host source and compiled host launchers; game executables, generated game code, retail files, language banks, settings and saves are excluded.

The launcher recognizes both a portable bin/black_xbox_recomp.exe and the existing build-vs2022/Release/black_xbox_recomp.exe layout. Keep black-release.json beside the release launchers. Archive/file SHA-256 checksums are included.

Startup logos skip on one press of Escape, Enter, Space, left click, or controller A / B / Start. During a cutscene, the first press shows Press again to skip in the bottom-right corner. Release and press again within three seconds to skip; holding a button cannot confirm. The hint also works with native menus disabled and stays at the window corner on ultrawide displays. Looping menu backgrounds keep playing normally. See the movie skip tests.

Ambient occlusion adds contact shading from scene depth with SSAO Classic, HBAO, HBAO+, and GTAO, each with Low, Medium, High, and Ultra quality. Choose the method and quality on the launcher's Graphics tab or the in-game Video Settings > Graphics page. AO defaults to Off, with High quality selected for when it is enabled. The launcher's labels and help follow the selected menu language. The in-game Video Settings > Graphics page also localizes its tabs, setting names, values, and help text between English and Brazilian Portuguese.

These are local implementations of the techniques; HBAO+ does not use the vendor SDK. The AO regression tests exercise the actual shaders, settings, launcher controls, and native camera hook without game files.

AO reconstructs positions at the sampled depth texel and retries when an early draw has no usable depth buffer. Autofocus selects a representative surface in the central aperture, reducing focus jumps from thin foreground objects. After a gap without usable scene depth, autofocus reacquires the current view instead of blending from an old foreground focus distance. Wider gameplay FOV preserves the native framing of the player's weapon, arms, and suppressor using their render-queue ownership. World and companion weapons retain their own projection; see the viewmodel tests. Ultrawide sniper scopes extend the original outer black masks to the screen edges while preserving the aperture and reticle. The scope mask tests cover native resource ownership, aspect ratios and temporary draw-state restoration.

Enemy weapon-model lookup now preserves carry in the original 64-bit name calculation. Corrupted model names previously left enemies without a weapon model and prevented their native death-drop code from creating pickups. The weapon model regressions cover the arithmetic and save-hash compatibility; native drop rules remain in control.

Launch through the first mission has been tested, including the opening movies, mission briefing, movement, shooting, and reloading with audio. This is still a work in progress: selected cemetery and docks scenes have also been checked, but complete later-mission playthroughs remain unverified. Crashes and rendering issues remain possible, and Xbox GP/EP audio effects are not fully emulated.

Gameplay voices and effects now honor their source sample rate at the 48 kHz audio output. This corrects 32 kHz speech playing about 50% too fast and high. The APU regression test checks pitch, duration, stream completion, and playback lifecycle without game files or an audio device.

The fallback mixer preserves dry left/right and 3D speaker assignments without playing raw effect sends a second time. This avoids reversed duplicate channels and the clipping they caused. Native DSP output still takes precedence; see the spatial audio regressions. To export speech or music from your own Xbox SSH/BKS banks, use the audio extraction guide.

Audio pacing retains fractional frame time and recovers ordinary scheduling delays. The Windows output queues two packets before starting playback to provide scheduling headroom, and restores that buffering after an underrun. The timing and output queue regressions cover these paths without an audio device. A reported critical device error recreates the output on its submission thread and primes fresh samples; failed retries are limited to once per second. Set RECOMP_APU_TRACE_OUTPUT=1 for five-second source, clipping, queue, playback and recovery counters when investigating an audio problem.

BLACK also routes its primary stereo audio through custom DSP bins 19/20. The dry fallback includes that explicit pair when native EP PCM is unavailable, restoring soundtracks and level sounds that have no standard speaker send. Other effect sends stay excluded to avoid duplicated or reversed dry audio. The spatial regression checks channel direction, auxiliary sends, and native PCM ownership.

The APU also receives the size of the runtime's actual physical mappings, including the second view of low guest RAM when it is present. This lets GP/EP bootstrap and DMA reach valid audio pages above the 64 MB contiguous arena while retaining bounds checks for unmapped memory. The physical backing regression covers both DSPs and their scratch/FIFO transfers. Cutscene soundtracks use the same guest audio pipeline; they are stored separately from the native XMV video files.

This repository contains host source and build tooling. You must supply your own original Xbox game files. Game assets, the XBE, generated game-function bodies, recordings, and prebuilt game executables are excluded. Release archives may include compiled host launchers that contain no game code.

For a build entirely on Linux, follow the Linux guide and run bash './Build BLACK.sh'. The requirements below describe the Windows build.

Requirements:

• Windows x64, an AVX2-capable CPU, and a Direct3D 11 graphics device.
• Visual Studio 2022 with Desktop development with C++ and a Windows SDK.
• Git, CMake 3.20 or newer, and Python 3.10 or newer (py -3).
• Rustup with the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain (the pinned DSP build uses Rust 1.98.1).
• The supported retail original Xbox release of BLACK, extracted into game/.

The supported game/default.xbe has SHA-256:

DF2739C372D254A90AEECCF5971D12097F22D89FBB90DB021FDA96DD4DEB68F6

Keep the extracted disc layout intact, including GlobData.bin, levels/, sound/, and videos/. Other releases and the PlayStation 2 version are not supported by this build.

From PowerShell in this repository:

.\scripts\setup.ps1
.\'BLACK PC Launcher.exe'

Setup fetches pinned XboxRecomp and DSP56300 revisions, applies the included runtime patch, creates a local Python environment, generates code from your XBE, and builds the game and launcher. These dependencies and outputs stay outside Git. Building the generated C code can take several minutes.

BLACK PC Launcher.exe starts the game directly using your saved preferences. Open BLACK PC Settings.exe to configure controls and video settings separately, or run BLACK PC Launcher.exe --settings. The settings window also retains its Play button. Leave Skip movies and Advance startup menus automatically unchecked to watch the full opening and navigate manually. Local settings live in local/ and diagnostic logs in reports/. Save-related data uses save/ as well as game/UDATA/ and game/TDATA/ through the native partition mapping. Close the game and back up all three data directories before moving or removing the project folder if you want to keep your progress.

The launcher's Game > Menu language setting chooses English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, or Italian for both the launcher and game, and is saved in local/xbox-launcher.json. Spanish, French, German, and Italian are marked as machine-draft translations and still need fluent-speaker review. Before each run, the launcher installs the selected bank at game/language/strings/MainUS.bin and passes that language to the game. The launcher build preserves the recognized original English bank at local/language-banks/en-US/MainUS.bin and generates the Brazilian Portuguese bank plus four machine-draft language banks on a fresh setup. The launcher also preserves English before applying another language. If the installed bank was previously translated or changed and no English copy exists, restore the original English MainUS.bin from supported retail files to that source path before launching. The reference English bank SHA-256 is B23EEB4AD86A72894B40E7239D0EA8842E5A6BC05936A936401B608070E8C7BB. English and Brazilian Portuguese banks come from the user's local game files. The build can generate Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Italian banks under local/language-banks/ when the preserved English bank is present. No licensed bank is included in Git. A missing selected bank leaves the installed text unchanged, and a new or invalid language setting defaults to English.

Nine spoken cutscenes have subtitle tracks in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The runtime selects a track using the game language and lays captions out inside the active picture area, including 4:3, 16:9, and ultrawide presentations. Spanish, French, German, and Italian tracks remain pending fluent-speaker and full audio review; speaker-attribution uncertainties are documented in subtitles/SPEAKER_ATTRIBUTION_REVIEW.csv. Experimental retiming candidates and gameplay ASR dialogue are not loaded.

AO requires the GPU renderer. Every quality uses a full-resolution R8 mask and depth-aware blur; higher quality increases sampling density and radius. AO multiplies scene color before depth of field, FXAA, sharpening, and the HUD. It uses the world camera's current half-frustum, captured with each queued draw so asynchronous rendering keeps the correct camera. Missing camera data or an incompatible depth surface bypasses the effect. Depth reconstruction uses a calibrated approximation, and HUD separation follows the existing depth-state heuristic. First-mission HBAO+ High and AO Off were checked in gameplay; later missions remain unverified.

Saved video settings use ao_method=off|ssao|hbao|hbao_plus|gtao and ao_quality=low|medium|high|ultra. RECOMP_AO_METHOD and RECOMP_AO_QUALITY override and lock their respective controls for that run. Legacy ssao and RECOMP_SSAO settings remain supported. Untouched older default menu layouts upgrade to include both AO controls; customized layouts are preserved.

Built on XboxRecomp by sp00nz, with xemu-derived hardware components and nv2a_vsh_cpu. The original Xbox behavior was investigated using community hardware documentation, including XboxDevWiki and Cxbx-Reloaded references. Development included assistance from Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.

Original project code is MIT licensed. Third-party components and their modifications retain their respective licenses; see LICENSE, NOTICE, and LICENSES. BLACK belongs to its respective owners; this project is an unofficial community effort.