holdmysocks/mcla-recomp

Static recompilation of Midnight Club: Los Angeles Complete Edition (Xbox 360, title 545407F8) to native code, for Windows, Linux and jailbroken PS5 consoles.

Installed on a jailbroken PS5. The tile here is one the user supplied at build time; the background is made from the art on their own disc.

This repository contains no game code, assets or keys. You supply your own legally obtained copy; a script extracts what is needed on your machine, and the recompiled code is generated locally and never committed. What you build is for you, not for sharing.

Car reflections are fixed on every renderer (cars no longer come out white with a glow at night):

Only Midnight Club: Los Angeles Complete Edition, USA/Europe, for Xbox 360 (title id 545407F8), as a disc image (.iso). The fixes in config/ are addresses in that release's executable; another region or revision would need them checked again.

The game's PowerPC code is translated to C++ ahead of time by the ReXGlue SDK (BSD-3, derived from Xenia), which also provides the Xbox 360 kernel, GPU and audio reimplementation. This repository holds the project manifest, function hints, a small host application, patches to the SDK and the build scripts.

You need Windows 10 or 11 (x86-64) with a Direct3D 12 graphics card, and about 20 GB of disk. In PowerShell:

git clone https://github.com/holdmysocks/mcla-recomp.git
cd mcla-recomp
.\scripts\make_pc.ps1 -Iso C:\path\to\your.iso

The script checks for Git, CMake, Ninja, Python 3, Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 (C++ workload) and the project's own Clang 20, and offers to install what is missing (answer y, or add -InstallTools); the Build Tools ask for administrator rights. It then clones and patches the ReXGlue SDK v0.10.0, builds it (the long step, once), extracts your game into game\, recompiles it and builds out\build\win-amd64-release\mcla.exe. Each step is skipped when its result is already there, so after a failure or an update you run the same command again. Logs are in out\logs.

Play: double-click the Midnight Club Los Angeles shortcut the build leaves in the repository folder, or mcla.exe itself. Keep the folder where it was built; the game data is read from game\. An Xbox or PlayStation controller works.

Options go after the program name, for example mcla.exe --fullscreen=true --mcla_fps=60 (30, 60, 120, or 0 for uncapped). The pause menu has three extra entries: DISPLAY (frame-rate target, vsync, fullscreen, motion blur, depth of field), PERFORMANCE (detail options) and CONTROLS (button prompts, intro speed); changes are saved to mcla.toml next to mcla.exe.

Update: git pull, then .\scripts\make_pc.ps1 again.

Tested on Ubuntu 26.04. You need Clang 20 and LLD (clang-20, clang++-20, lld-20), CMake 3.25+, Ninja, Python 3, Git, a Vulkan 1.3 driver, and these packages (Debian/Ubuntu names): libgtk-3-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxss-dev libvulkan-dev libwayland-dev libwayland-bin wayland-protocols libxkbcommon-dev libdecor-0-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libpipewire-0.3-dev. Linux 6.11 or newer is recommended.

git clone https://github.com/holdmysocks/mcla-recomp.git
cd mcla-recomp
git clone --recursive --branch v0.10.0 https://github.com/rexglue/rexglue-sdk.git third_party/rexglue-sdk
cd third_party/rexglue-sdk
git apply ../../patches/rexglue-v0.10.0-mcla.patch
git apply ../../patches/rexglue-minmax-blend-factor.patch
git -C thirdparty/FFmpeg apply ../../../../patches/rexglue-ffmpeg-ps5-config.patch
git apply ../../patches/rexglue-linux-procmap-query.patch
git apply ../../patches/rexglue-linux-wait-sleep.patch
CC=clang-20 CXX=clang++-20 cmake --preset linux-amd64 -DREXGLUE_USE_VULKAN=ON -DREXGLUE_ENABLE_TRACY=OFF
cmake --build out/build/linux-amd64 --config Release
cmake --install out/build/linux-amd64 --config Release
cd ../..
python3 scripts/extract_game.py /path/to/your.iso
SDK=$PWD/third_party/rexglue-sdk/out/install/linux-amd64
"$SDK/bin/rexglue" codegen mcla_manifest.toml
CC=clang-20 CXX=clang++-20 cmake --preset linux-amd64-release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$SDK"
cmake --build --preset linux-amd64-release
./scripts/play_linux.sh

On Wayland, put vulkan_allow_present_mode_immediate = false and vulkan_allow_present_mode_mailbox = false in out/build/linux-amd64-release/mcla.toml; without them the game presents about 1,000 times a second and keeps the GPU busy.

You need a jailbroken PS5 that runs homebrew, with an FTP server payload (port 2121 by default) and a homebrew mounter that shows folders under /data/homebrew on the home screen (ShadowMountPlus was used). The build runs on Arch Linux as root: on Windows, an Arch distribution under WSL2. Allow about 30 GB of disk, 16 GB of memory, and about 45 minutes the first time.

On Windows, in PowerShell as administrator:

wsl --install --no-distribution
wsl --update
wsl --install -d archlinux
wsl -d archlinux -u root

Then, in that Linux shell (your Windows drives are under /mnt, so C:\Games\mcla.iso is /mnt/c/Games/mcla.iso):

pacman -Sy --noconfirm git
cd /root
git clone https://github.com/holdmysocks/mcla-recomp.git
cd mcla-recomp
bash ps5/make_ps5.sh --iso /mnt/c/path/to/your.iso --console 192.168.1.50

Use your console's address, and start the FTP payload first. Without --console it only builds and prints what to copy where. Keep the repository under /root, not /mnt/c. The script installs its packages, builds the PS5 toolchain and Vulkan driver (mihawk-99/PS5_Vulkan), patches and builds the SDK, extracts and recompiles your game, packages the title and uploads it. Each step is skipped when its result exists, so you run the same command again after a failure or an update (git pull first). Logs are in /root/mcla/logs.

After the upload, let the mounter pick up /data/homebrew/PPSA99779; "Midnight Club: Los Angeles" appears on the home screen. On the console, /data/mcla/game holds the game data, /data/mcla/mcla.toml the settings and /data/mcla/mcla-play.log the log of the last start.

Your own tile and theme (optional). No artwork or music ships here. --tile IMAGE takes any common image (for example the official cover art); --theme FILE.at9 takes an ATRAC9 file. For a theme, turn the audio down first (ffmpeg -i in.m4a -af loudnorm=I=-28:TP=-2 -ar 48000 -ac 2 quiet.wav), then convert it with AT9-AT3 Converter (AT9, PS4, bitrate 72). The console keeps a title's tile and sound from when it was first registered.

If you hand this to an AI agent: it needs your disc image's path and the console's address from you, must not look for or download a disc image, and writes to the console only with --console.

If the game stops with Call to invalid or unregistered function at guest address ..., the recompiler missed a function that is only reached through a pointer. Please open an issue with that line; the fix is one entry in config/runtime_discovered.toml.

• ReXGlue SDK by Tom Clay and contributors; Xenia by Ben Vanik and contributors.
• LARecomp by mzzvxm and contributors, whose fixes several parts of this project are ported from, with permission.
• PS5_Vulkan by mihawk-99 (GPL-3): the RADV port and toolchain the PS5 version is built on.
• XenonRecomp by hedge-dev, on which ReXGlue's analysis builds.
• The Linux build by @MoonFuji.

GPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE. Midnight Club is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games or Take-Two.