pc-arcrisefantasia

Toward a native PC port of Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii, imageepoch, 2009; Ignition Entertainment in North America, 2010), the JRPG. It was a Wii exclusive and never re-released. The goal is the game running natively on PC, played with a gamepad as the Classic Controller, or the keyboard.

The route is static recompilation: the game's own PowerPC code, translated to C++ and built for the PC, running on a replacement for the Wii's hardware and system software. Nothing is emulated at the instruction level, and nothing of the game is rewritten.

This repository documents the disc and its code, and holds the port's own tools and layer. It is the fourth port built on wiikit, the game-agnostic Wii toolkit that grew with pc-victorious, pc-dragonquestswords and pc-conduit2, taken here as a submodule at wiikit/ (clone with --recursive, or git submodule update --init). Where this game needs something every Wii game would need (WPAD's own samples, thousands of tiny draws merged, disc files sized from the FST), it goes into wiikit, not here.

Where it stands

After one session the game boots, draws, sounds and plays to its first battle: the strap screen, the Ignition, Marvelous, imageepoch and CRIWARE logos, the title, the System menu, a new game, the prologue and the first battle, at 16:9. It is played with a gamepad as the Classic Controller (an Xbox One pad here), or the keyboard. Everything runs at the game's own 30 frames a second but battles, which run at 27-30: the renderer still spends too long in the driver per draw. It is not yet played through: nothing past the first battle has been tried, and no save has been written yet (the prologue had not reached a save point). The keyboard has wiikit's default Classic keys, a shooter's layout, not yet one made for a JRPG. See Status and docs/07-next-session.md.

BYOA — Bring Your Own Assets

This repository contains documentation and tools only. No game data, no executables, no assets. You need your own original disc. The work is done on the North American release, RPJE7U; the addresses in tools/ and docs/ are that executable's.

Layout

docs/     disc, code and input analysis, the plan, the session log
tools/    Arc Rise Fantasia-specific tools, the port's layer (arf.cpp)
wiikit/   game-agnostic Wii toolkit (submodule: github.com/vs-sr-dev/wiikit)
build/    (not in git) the disc, everything derived from it, the build

Tools

The Python tools need only Python 3.8+ and no dependencies (RVZ images compressed with zstd, as this game's usually is, need Python 3.14; pycryptodome, if installed, speeds up disc decryption; dolphin.py needs Pillow for its screenshots). Building the recompiled code needs CMake, Ninja, a C++20 compiler (clang from MSYS2 is what is used here) and SDL3; running it needs OpenGL 4.5. Run from the repository root.

# the disc, straight from the RVZ (or .iso, .wbfs)
python -m wiikit.disc GAME.rvz --info
python -m wiikit.disc GAME.rvz --extract build/extract

# the executable: stripped, so its names are found, not read
python -m wiikit.dol build/extract/sys/main.dol --info
python tools/sigmatch.py build/extract/sys/main.dol \
    --dsy <Dolphin>/Sys/totaldb.dsy --out build/sig_guess.tsv
python tools/names.py build/extract/sys/main.dol      # -> build/names.tsv

The names come from Dolphin's signature database, totaldb.dsy, which every Dolphin install carries in its Sys folder (next to Dolphin.exe on Windows: Dolphin-x64/Sys/totaldb.dsy). sigmatch.py hashes the DOL's functions as Dolphin does and looks them up there (1 704 found); names.py keeps the unique ones, adds the SDK functions that print their own name, and the hand names of tools/names-manual.tsv, each with its evidence: 1 392 names, among them every function the runtime hooks that the game has. With --elf, sigmatch.py also takes signatures from any symbolised executable (Victorious's Oscar_wii_final_versioned.elf adds 138 names); the build does not need them. See docs/03-executable.md.

# recompile, build: the port's hooks, and its layer through WIIKIT_EXTRA
python -m wiikit.recomp build/extract/sys/main.dol --out build/recomp \
    --symbols build/names.tsv --hooks tools/arf-hooks.txt
cmake -S build/recomp -B build/recomp-build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE=-O1 \
    -DWIIKIT_EXTRA=$PWD/tools/arf.cmake
ninja -C build/recomp-build

# boot the game: the NAND (saves, SYSCONF) in build/nand; the boot ROM's
# fonts and the DSP ROM's resampling table in build/fonts (font_western.bin,
# font_japanese.bin, dsp_coef.bin: Dolphin's Sys/GC has free ones)
build/recomp-build/wiiboot build/extract --symbols build/names.tsv
build/recomp-build/wiiboot build/extract --window 1920x1080
build/recomp-build/wiiboot build/extract --input pad      # the pad alone on channel 1

# where the time goes: a frame's cost every second; a sampling profiler of
# the game's thread (1) or the renderer's (render) (see wiikit)
WIIKIT_PERF=1 build/recomp-build/wiiboot build/extract 2> run.err
WIIKIT_PROFILE=render build/recomp-build/wiiboot build/extract 2> run.err

tools/look.py is wiikit.ppc on the stripped DOL: discovery's functions, these names (--func KPADRead, --callers, --xref). tools/dolphin.py runs the disc in Dolphin as the reference, with screenshots and key presses on a timeline (--dolphin PATH, or DOLPHIN in the environment).

Playing

The game plays with a Classic Controller (its System menu chooses it by itself), which the port makes out of any gamepad and the keyboard. Channel 1 merges the keyboard, the mouse buttons and the first pad: buttons from any of them, each stick from whichever is pushed further. Every other pad plugged in is the next channel. --input pad or --input keyboard keeps one source on channel 1. The mouse's motion does nothing: there is no pointer in this game.

Keys	Gamepad	Classic Controller
W A S D	left stick	left stick
	right stick	right stick
Enter, Space	right face button	A
Backspace, C	bottom face button	B
R	top face button	X
F	left face button	Y
Left Shift, E	shoulders	L, R
right mouse button	left trigger	ZL
left mouse button	right trigger	ZR
Tab, Q	Start, Back	+, -
arrows	d-pad	d-pad
H	guide	Home
Esc, F11 / Alt+Enter, F12		pause box, fullscreen, trace a frame's GX commands

The pad's face buttons count by position, as on a Classic Controller (the right one is A); Face Buttons = Label in the key file counts them by their labels instead. The keys are in build/keys.txt, written with wiikit's defaults on the first run; its [Classic Controller] section changes them (the right stick has no keys by default). F12 writes the trace to the working directory.

Status

Session 1: the game plays, with a pad. The disc read from its RVZ (9 428 files), the stripped executable named and recompiled at the first try (13 633 units, no gaps); the game boots through its logos to the title, a new game, the prologue and the first battle, with sound, played with an Xbox One pad as the Classic Controller. The game reads the Classic from WPAD's raw samples, through a copy of them only the 2007 KPAD keeps, so wiikit learnt to answer there. A steady 30 frames a second, the game's rate, but in battles: 27-30 since wiikit merges the thousands of tiny draws of skinned models into single calls (20 before). The first boot took minutes: wiikit opened every file of the disc to size it, and the antivirus scanned each one; sizes now come from the FST. See docs/00-sessions.md.

Documentation

00-sessions.md            progress log
01-disc-layout.md         what is on the disc
03-executable.md          the stripped DOL: what is linked, how it is named, landmarks
04-curiosities.md         what the disc reveals
07-next-session.md        the plan for the next session
08-input.md               the Classic Controller: how the game reads it
10-wiikit.md              how this port uses and grows wiikit

Licence

MIT. This covers the documentation and tools in this repository only. It says nothing about Arc Rise Fantasia, which remains the property of its rights holders.