fifastreet2-recomp

An attempt of a static recompilation of the Xbox version of FIFA Street 2 into a native Windows version, built with the xboxrecomp toolkit.

This videogame is a wonderful childhood memory and I hope this ambitious project may resonate with some other people.

Status

Boots, initializes the Xbox kernel shim and memory layout, reaches the recompiled entry point. A window does not show up and the process has to be manually killed or scheduled via watchdog.

Game useful info

Title	FIFA Street 2
Title ID	0x45410085
XDK version	5849
Build date	2006-01-11
Entry point	0x0024D87E
Code size	~2.44 MB (.text)
Functions	15,314 recompiled (src/recomp/gen/, 16 split files)

Project structure

fifastreet2-recomp/
├── CMakeLists.txt          # Builds fifastreet2.exe, links the xboxrecomp toolkit
├── xboxrecomp/              # Toolkit, vendored as a pinned git submodule
├── patches/xboxrecomp/      # Local fixes applied on top of the pinned commit
├── scripts/setup.ps1        # Initializes the submodule and applies patches/
├── game_files/               # Your own copy of the original game data (gitignored)
│   ├── default.xbe
│   └── mygame_analysis.json  # Output of Step 2 below
└── src/
    ├── main.c                # Host entry point (XBE load, kernel init, boot)
    ├── recomp_manual.c        # Hand-written function overrides
    └── recomp/gen/            # Generated code (gitignored, regenerate with Step 5)

Prerequisites

• Windows 11 (or 10 with recent updates)
• Visual Studio 2022 with the C/C++ desktop workload (MSVC)
• CMake 3.20+
• Python 3.10+ with capstone installed (pip install capstone)
• Your own legally-owned FIFA Street 2 disc, extracted to game_files/ (not included in this repo, see legal notice)

Setup

Clone with submodules, or initialize them afterwards:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:jv36/fifastreet2-recomp.git
cd fifastreet2-recomp

# If you already cloned without --recurse-submodules, or a patch was added later:
.\scripts\setup.ps1

scripts/setup.ps1 runs git submodule update --init --recursive and then applies every patch under patches/xboxrecomp/ to the vendored toolkit. Those patches are fixes this project needed in xboxrecomp itself (see patches/xboxrecomp); re-run the script any time a new patch is added, it skips ones already applied.

Extract game files

Extract default.xbe and the data files from your disc image into game_files/ using extract-xiso:

extract-xiso -x "FIFA Street 2.iso" -d game_files/

Regenerating the recompiled code

src/recomp/gen/ is gitignored and generated from the XBE. You only need to redo this if you change the toolkit's lifter/disassembler or want to pick up newly recovered function names. All commands below run from the xboxrecomp/ submodule (that's where tools/ lives), writing output back into this repo with --gen-dir.

cd xboxrecomp

# 1. Parse the XBE (writes game_files/mygame_analysis.json, read by step 2)
py -3 -m tools.xbe_parser ..\game_files\default.xbe --json ..\game_files\mygame_analysis.json

# 2. Disassemble .text into functions.json / xrefs.json
py -3 -m tools.disasm ..\game_files\default.xbe --text-only -v

# 3. Classify functions (CRT / RW / XDK / GAME / STUB)
py -3 -m tools.func_id ..\game_files\default.xbe -v

# 4. (optional) Recover real names for CRT/XDK functions with Ghidra
XBE=../game_files/default.xbe tools/ghidra_naming/run_ghidra.sh
py -3 tools/ghidra_naming/merge_names.py --apply

# 5. Recompile to C, splitting into ~1000-function chunks
py -3 -m tools.recomp ..\game_files\default.xbe --all --split 1000 --gen-dir ..\src\recomp\gen

cd ..

See xboxrecomp/docs/GETTING_STARTED.md for the full walkthrough of each step, including what to do when a step fails. Step 4 also needs extra Ghidra configs and you can check them out there: I am not familiar with this tool (at least for now... :)

Building

Be sure to build this with the correct CMakeLists.txt.

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

Running

Run from the repo root - the game files must already be under game_files/, matching YOUR_GAME_DIR in src/main.c:

build\Release\fifastreet2.exe 2>stderr.txt

Legal notice

Note that this repo and project will NEVER provide any game files and these must come from a legally owned copy. This project aims to help preservating a game that never had a PC version, and to improve my reverse engineering and C skills.

References and inspirations

• xboxrecomp - the toolkit this project is built on
• sp00nznet/burnout3 - Burnout 3: Takedown recompilation
• GTTeancum/OpenXML1xbox - X-Men Legends recompilation
• ...all other awesome recomp projects!