Vandal Hearts

Game: Vandal Hearts (PS1, 1996)

A native PC port of the PlayStation Vandal Hearts, built on byte-exact matching decompilations of the game: the US executable (SLUS_004.47) and, since 2.0.0, the Japanese one (SLPM_860.07), which the build reproduces and which is verified on every change. The console’s interfaces (GPU packets, GTE math, CD-ROM and XA audio, SPU, MDEC video, and pad input) are replaced with portable equivalents using SDL2, Metal or OpenGL, and OpenAL. One executable recognizes the US, Asian, and Japanese discs. On top of the faithful game it adds, optionally, reworked controls with an enemy threat overlay, an options and save-management overlay, a “Tactical Mode” that rebalances the game, an exact software rasterizer with internal-resolution supersampling, fast-forward, a translation framework (a community Spanish pack exists, hosted by its author), and HD packs with upscaled backgrounds and movies. 2.1.0 is from August 31. There are Windows and Linux (AppImage) builds; the macOS build is experimental and compiled from the source. The repository includes the game’s decompiled C code and a few functional game-data tables, and the releases publish two HD packs of about 330 MB (one per region), with upscaled backgrounds and movies that the project describes as derivative art. 84 of its last 100 commits list Claude as a co-author.

You needYour own Vandal Hearts disc image (.bin): US (SLUS-00447), Asian (SCPS-45183), or Japanese (SLPM-86007), in a game/ folder beside the executable; without it the download does nothing. Plus Windows 10 or 11, or Linux with glibc 2.34 or later and FUSE2 for the AppImage, or macOS 11 or later building from the source.

How it gets to PC

Port of a decompilation

Console

PlayStation

Original studio

Konami

Year

1996

Author

HalmyLyseas

Stars

58

Last activity

2026-08-31 · 2 months ago

Latest version

v2.1.0 · 2026-08-31

License

GPL-2.0

Language

C