Virtual Pro Wrestling 64: Recompiled is a project that uses N64Recomp to statically recompile the Nintendo 64 game Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 (Japan) into a native PC port, running on the N64ModernRuntime with RT64 as the rendering engine. It is the sister project of WCW vs. nWo World Tour: Recompiled — VPW64 and World Tour are direct siblings, released seventeen days apart in December 1997 — and of WCW/nWo Revenge: Recompiled, sharing their runtime stack and conventions.
This repository and its releases do not contain game assets. The original game is required to build or run this project.
Status: beta. The game boots, renders at high resolution, plays music and sound effects, takes keyboard and gamepad input through the menus and matches, rumbles, and saves persist automatically. See Known Issues for what's still rough.
- System Requirements
- Features
- Planned Features
- FAQ
- Known Issues
- Lighting
- Mods and ROM Hacks
- Building
- Libraries Used and Projects Referenced
- Special Thanks
Currently a Windows build is provided; other operating systems may be supported later.
A GPU supporting Direct3D 12.0 (Shader Model 6) or Vulkan 1.2 is required. A CPU supporting the SSE4.1 instruction set is also required (Intel Core 2 Penryn series or AMD Bulldozer and newer).
If you have crashes on startup, make sure your graphics drivers are fully up to date.
Provide your copy of the Japanese release of the game and start playing! The project loads assets directly from your ROM, so there is no separate extraction or build step.
Rendering is hardware-accelerated through RT64 at high resolution, with the game's original visual effects intact — no emulator-style workarounds or hacks.
With Aspect Ratio set to Expand (the default), the 3D scene renders at your window's aspect ratio with a correctly widened field of view, while 2D interface elements stay at their original proportions.
Press Esc (or your gamepad's Back/Select button) during play to open the config menu: general settings, graphics settings, full input rebinding for keyboard and controller (two bindings per input), and audio settings. Menus can be used with mouse, keyboard, or controller.
Like the rest of the AKI wrestling family, VPW64 moves on the N64 d-pad and taunts with the analog stick, so the default mappings are built for that: move on the left stick and d-pad, taunt on the right stick, and the defensive pair on mirrored triggers. Grapple = A, attack = X, run = B, climb/turnbuckle = Y, switch focus = bumpers. Keyboard: WASD moves, IJKL taunts, Space/Shift/Q/E/R for the face buttons. Everything is rebindable in the in-game menu.
On real hardware VPW64 saves player records to a Controller Pak — which occupies the same controller slot a Rumble Pak needs, forcing players to physically swap paks. The port's virtual pak is both at once: saves are always honored and persist automatically across sessions, and your gamepad rumbles during matches. No juggling.
Settings → Graphics → Framerate offers 30 (Original), 60 (Smooth) and 120 (Experimental). The extra frames are generated by frame interpolation, so the game itself still runs at its original speed.
With Ray Tracing on, the arena lights cast real shadows (replacing the game's blob shadows) and ambient occlusion darkens the places where surfaces meet. Ray Tracing Quality goes from Performance to Ultra. Every venue has its own lighting rig: colored light, glowing screens and lamps, and the lighting follows the camera cuts. This release rigs all seven federation arenas (NSW, EWF, WOU, DAW, ILW, WCW and NWO). You can change the lighting yourself: see Lighting. Needs the D3D12 graphics API and a GPU with DirectX Raytracing 1.1 (RTX-class).
CRT Filter simulates a period TV: the video signal (Composite, S-Video, RF or RGB), scanlines, phosphor mask and glow, with USA or Japan TV Colors. The optional CRT Beam Simulator recreates the CRT's rolling scan for motion clarity (needs V-Sync and a 120 Hz or faster display).
HDR outputs in HDR on displays with Windows HDR turned on. HDR Picture picks how bright the game's white is: Auto (the default) suits your display, matching your desktop, or with the CRT filter on, leaving enough headroom for a full-strength phosphor mask. Brighter, Balanced, CRT Detail and Custom (in nits) are there if you prefer something else, and the setting's description shows your display's brightness and what your choice gives.
The Mods menu (Settings → Mods) installs, configures and switches mods on and off. A free camera, cheats and a Quick Match testing tool come bundled; see Mods and ROM Hacks.
- Linux support
Static recompilation is the process of automatically translating an application from one platform to another — here, the game's original MIPS machine code is translated into C and compiled for modern PCs. For details, see N64Recomp. This is not an emulator and not a decompilation.
It isn't — no public decompilation of Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 exists. Unlike most
recompilation ports, which borrow symbol names from a decomp, this project generated
its own symbol metadata from scratch via a splat
disassembly (see disasm/ and syms/), transferring libultra identifications from
its sister project World Tour by machine-code fingerprinting.
Yes. Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 was only released in Japan, and this port renders the game exactly as it shipped — menus and wrestler names are in Japanese. (The menus are straightforward to navigate even without Japanese; the port's own config menus are in English.) A community English translation patch exists for the original ROM; patched ROMs are not accepted as the game ROM, but a translation may run as a patch mod on top of the clean ROM if it only edits code in place (untested so far): see Mods and ROM Hacks.
- Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Vpw64Recompiled\saves\
Configuration files and the log file live one level up in the same app folder. Save data is preserved across updates.
Yes — place a file named portable.txt in the same folder as the executable and
saves, config files, and the stored ROM will be kept next to the executable instead.
You don't. This project is only a port of Virtual Pro Wrestling 64, and it
only accepts one specific ROM: the Japanese N64 release
(SHA1 F9E9FA2ED819C3A39DB5CB6AFECA186F021DB5ED). It is not an emulator and it
cannot run any arbitrary ROM.
You can't accidentally load the wrong file — the launcher validates the ROM before storing its own copy (so the original file can be moved or deleted afterwards). If the stored copy ever goes missing or gets corrupted, the launcher simply offers Load ROM again.
- The title screen's pak status reports "a Rumble Pak is inserted" — that's the port's virtual pak answering the game's rumble probe, exactly as real hardware would with a Rumble Pak in the slot. Saves still work (and persist) regardless.
- Overlays such as MSI Afterburner and other software such as Wallpaper Engine can cause performance issues that prevent the game from rendering correctly. Disabling such software is recommended.
- Quitting the game in the middle of a match can crash on the way out.
- Ray tracing, frame interpolation, the CRT filter and HDR are experimental. If something looks wrong,
turn the feature off and please report it with your log file
(
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Vpw64Recompiled\Vpw64Recompiled.log).
With Ray Tracing on, the lights come from assets\rt_lights.json in the game's folder (next to
Vpw64Recompiled.exe; for AKI Launcher installs, the game's install folder). You can edit it with any text editor while
the game runs: the game reloads it within a second, so you see each change straight away.
The file has three parts:
"default": the rig for any scene without its own preset."room": the generated fallback for small rooms without a preset (ceiling lights spread over the room)."venues": one preset per venue. A venue is recognized by its"match"list of texture hashes (the textures it draws); a preset only changes the fields it sets, the rest come from"default".
The main fields (distances are in game units, Y is up, and in arenas [0, 0, 0] is the middle of the ring):
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
"lights" |
Up to 8 lights: [x, y, z, weight], or [x, y, z, weight, r, g, b] for a colored one. Lower lights cast longer shadows. |
"color" |
Tints every light, [r, g, b] (brightness stays the same). |
"size" |
Width of each light: bigger = softer shadows. |
"shadow", "characterShadow" |
Shadow strength (0 to 1) on the world and on the wrestlers. |
"radius" |
How far from the center shadows land. |
"glows" |
Up to 4 glowing spots (screens, lamps): [x, y, z, intensity, range], optionally , r, g, b and a flicker amount. |
"outsideDarkness", "outsideEdge" |
Darkens everything beyond the radius (the crowd), easing in over outsideEdge units: the "house lights down" look. 0 = off. |
"litAreas" |
Up to 2 places, [x, z, radius, edge], kept out of that darkness (an entrance stage, for example). |
"anchor": "scene" |
Positions become offsets from the scene's center and floor, for rooms that sit anywhere in the world. |
The top of the file documents every field.
The game has a live editor for all of this:
- Close the game, open
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Vpw64Recompiled\graphics.json(orgraphics.jsonnext to the exe in portable mode) and set"developer_mode": true. - Start the game and press F1 to open the RT64 inspector. Its Lighting window shows the venue the game
detected and has sliders for every field, a split-screen view (ray tracing on one half only), and Save, which
writes
rt_lights.json. - To light a venue that has no preset yet, go there, type a name and press New venue from current scene: it fills in the venue's textures for you.
The bundled free camera (F6, see below) helps you look at the venue from anywhere while you work.
Releases replace assets\rt_lights.json, so keep a copy of your edits. To keep your own file somewhere else, set
the environment variable WCW_RT_LIGHTS_FILE to its full path before starting the game.
This port loads mods in the .nrm format used by the N64: Recompiled projects.
Three mods come with the game and are kept up to date by it. They do nothing until you use them:
- Camera: a free camera. Press F6 and fly around with WASD (Space/Ctrl up and down, Shift for speed) and the mouse; press F6 again to give the camera back to the game.
- Cheat Codes: on/off cheats for this game, plus a box for your own GameShark codes. All off by default.
- Quick Match (testing): a developer tool that skips the intro and starts a CPU-vs-CPU match in a chosen venue. Off by default; leave it off for normal play.
Their options are in Settings → Mods. To turn one off, switch it off there (deleting its file doesn't stick: the game puts it back).
Copy the .nrm file into the game's mods folder, or use Install Mods in the Mods menu (or drag the file onto
the window):
- Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Vpw64Recompiled\mods\(ormods\next to the executable in portable mode)
New mods are switched on by default. Mods are applied when the game starts, so restart after changing them. To remove a mod, delete its file.
A mod is a small C program compiled for the N64's MIPS CPU. The runtime links it into the recompiled game, where it can run code when a game function is called (a hook) or replace a game function (a patch).
The bundled mods are open source in AKI Mods: working examples, and a build script that does everything below for all six games at once.
You need:
- a C compiler with a MIPS backend:
zig ccworks out of the box (the Clang that ships with Visual Studio has no MIPS backend), plusld.lld; RecompModTool, built from N64Recomp;modding.handmod.ldfrom the MMRecompModTemplate (both work as they are; ignore its Majora's Mask headers);- this repository's
syms/dump.toml, which lists every function in the game.
There's no decompilation of this game, so functions go by their address (func_80001234). syms/dump.toml and the
disassembly in disasm\ are the map; func_80001078 runs at least once per frame, which makes it a good first hook:
#include "modding.h"
RECOMP_HOOK("func_80001078") void my_mod_on_frame(void) {
// runs every frame, before the game's own code
}Compile and link (the +nooddspreg feature matters: without it floating-point code comes out wrong):
zig cc -target mips-freestanding-none -mcpu=mips2 -mabi=32 -O2 -G0 -mno-abicalls -mno-odd-spreg -Xclang -target-feature -Xclang +nooddspreg -fno-builtin -nostdinc -ffreestanding -ffunction-sections -c my_mod.c -o my_mod.o
ld.lld my_mod.o -nostdlib -T mod.ld --unresolved-symbols=ignore-all --emit-relocs -e 0 --no-nmagic -gc-sections -o mod.elf
Describe the mod in a mod.toml and pack it:
[manifest]
id = "my_mod"
version = "1.0.0"
display_name = "My Mod"
short_description = "What it does."
authors = [ "you" ]
game_id = "vpw64"
minimum_recomp_version = "0.1.0"
dependencies = []
optional_dependencies = []
native_libraries = []
[inputs]
elf_path = "mod.elf"
mod_filename = "my_mod"
func_reference_syms_file = "path/to/syms/dump.toml"
data_reference_syms_files = []
additional_files = []RecompModTool mod.toml out
That writes out\my_mod.nrm, ready to install. Options declared under [[manifest.config_options]] appear in the
Mods menu; read them with the runtime's recomp_get_config_u32 / _double / _string exports (declare them with
RECOMP_IMPORT("*", ...)). The game also exports keyboard and mouse input to mods (recomp_get_key_down,
recomp_get_mouse_dx, ...; the full list is in src/main/main.cpp). There's no recomp_printf, and a mod that
imports a function the runtime doesn't have won't load. New mods are switched on as soon as they're installed, so a
mod you share should do nothing until the player turns it on.
Many ROM hacks can run as a patch mod: a mod that holds only a patch against the stock ROM. The game applies it to your own ROM when it starts, and any game code the hack changes is recompiled on the fly. It works for hacks that:
- are built on the same ROM this port uses (see the ROM's SHA1 above), and
- change code only inside the game's existing functions (data changes of any size are fine).
Hacks that add new code, rebuild or move the game's code, or are made for another revision need a full recompile and
can't run as patch mods. Only one patch mod can be on at a time; each one keeps its own saves in
saves\<mod id>\, apart from the stock game's.
To make one from a hack ROM you have patched yourself:
- Get a checkout of this repository and Python 3.
- Put your stock ROM in the repository root as
vpw64.z64, and generateRecompiledFuncs\(the recompile step in BUILDING.md). You don't need to build the game itself. - Make sure the hack ROM is big-endian
.z64(convert.n64/.v64dumps first). - Run:
python tools\romhack\make_patch_mod.py --base vpw64.z64 --hack my_hack.z64 --game-id vpw64 --id my_hack --name "My Hack" --out my_hack.nrm
The tool reports what the hack changes: data only, changed functions (fine: they're recompiled when the game
starts), or code that escapes its functions or lies outside them (needs a full recompile: the tool refuses to write
the mod). Without --out it only prints the report, a quick way to check a hack. Then install my_hack.nrm like any
other mod. More detail in tools/romhack/README.md.
Patch mods can contain the hack's and the original game's data, so don't share patch mods you don't have the rights to: make your own from your own ROMs.
Building is not required to play — grab a release instead. To build from source, see BUILDING.md.
- N64Recomp — the static recompiler this port is built with
- N64ModernRuntime — the modern runtime (ultramodern + librecomp)
- RT64 — the rendering engine
- librashader with guest's CRT shaders, and the Blur Busters CRT Beam Simulator, for the CRT filter
- RecompFrontend — launcher, config menus, and input stack
- RmlUi for building the menus and launcher
- lunasvg for SVG rendering, used by RmlUi
- FreeType for font rendering, used by RmlUi
- SDL2 for windowing, input, and audio
- moodycamel::ConcurrentQueue for semaphores and fast, lock-free MPMC queues
- Gamepad Motion Helpers for sensor fusion and calibration algorithms
- DirectX Shader Compiler, zstd, nativefiledialog-extended, and plume via RT64
- splat / spimdisasm for the disassembly that produced this project's symbol metadata
- Inter, Noto Emoji, and
PromptFont fonts (OFL; PromptFont license in
assets/promptfont/) - SDL_GameControllerDB for community controller mappings
- WCW vs. nWo World Tour: Recompiled, WCW/nWo Revenge: Recompiled, Bomberman Hero: Recompiled, and Zelda64Recomp as reference projects for structure and conventions
- Wiseguy and DarioSamo for creating N64Recomp and RT64.
- Gadge64 for the frame interpolation behind the 60 and 120 fps Framerate options (No Mercy: Recompiled #5), which the whole family of ports now uses.
- RevoSucks and the Bomberman Hero: Recompiled project, the template for this port's sister projects and therefore for this one.
- The Zelda64Recomp team for establishing the conventions the whole recomp ecosystem follows.
- ethteck and the splat/spimdisasm contributors — the disassembly tooling that made a no-decomp recompilation possible.