Legend of Sword and Fairy (SDLPal)

Game: Chinese Paladin: Sword and Fairy (DOS, 1995)

SDLPal: a cross-platform, SDL-based reimplementation of Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan (仙剑奇侠传), Softstar’s Chinese RPG known as PAL, that runs on the original game’s data. Wei Mingzhi created it in 2009, and a team maintains it today; many of its concepts come from the PAL Research Project’s documentation. It isn’t an emulator: the game runs as a native program, and only the OPL2 and OPL3 sound chips are emulated (with cores from DOSBox, MAME, and Chocolate Doom) to play the DOS version’s RIX music. It supports data from the DOS and Windows 95 versions and can combine the best of each, such as item descriptions in the DOS version or RIX music in the Windows 95 one, whose AVI videos it also plays. It adds MIDI, OGG, or MP3 music, translations through external message and font files, image filters with RetroArch GLSL shaders (experimental), and a settings window at launch, and its saves work with the original game’s and vice versa. There are builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS, plus Android, iOS, Wii, 3DS, the browser, and a libretro core. The latest release, 3.0.2025.0616 (June 2025), already uses SDL3; in 2026 work continued with controller and script interpreter fixes, and the Visual Studio build regained Windows XP support.

You needThe data files from your own copy of Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan: the DOS version, on floppy disks or CD, or the Windows 95 version, in Traditional Chinese or the Simplified Chinese “98 柔情篇”; the Sega Saturn version doesn’t work. The project recommends the version sold on Steam, and its wiki links Chinese sites where it can be downloaded legally for free. Plus Windows (XP included), Linux (as an AppImage), or macOS.

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Console

MS-DOS

Original studio

Softstar

Year

1995

Author

sdlpal

Stars

2k

Last activity

2026-10-29 · 2 days ago

Latest version

v3.0.2025.0616 · 2025-06-15

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C