A native PC port of a GameCube fighting game (disc ID GRSEAF), produced by static
recompilation rather than emulation: the disc's PowerPC executable is translated
ahead of time into C, compiled for x86-64, and run as native code inside a
Dolphin-derived runtime that provides the graphics, audio, input and hardware
emulation around it.
No game data and no game code are distributed here. You supply a disc image you already own; setup extracts it and recompiles it on your machine.
Fully playable — boots to menu and through gameplay, with zero interpreter fallback: every executed block runs as native code. The recompiler translates 535,368 instructions with 0 unknown opcodes. Rendering is Vulkan on the GPU, with the CPU emulation and the runtime on separate cores.
Steam Deck: supported, with its own prebuilt package — no toolchain, no compile step. Runs in both Desktop and Game Mode at 45–49 fps in a match.
Windows x86-64: revived as an experimental portable package. The runtime and recompiler are cross-compiled with MinGW on Linux; first-run compilation uses the Windows-native LLVM, CMake, Ninja and Python tools bundled in the ZIP. Earlier prereleases have booted and reached gameplay on real Windows hardware; the release workflow now also runs the exact portable ZIP through Wine and builds/loads a synthetic recompilation module with its bundled tools. Physical Windows setup, menu, gameplay and two-peer netplay QA is still recommended before treating an experimental prerelease as stable.
Netplay: the v1.2.1-ell.12 beta adds rollback, an Online Room flow using
Dolphin's hosted traversal service, and a Ready-gated lobby. Its Linux/source
implementation has passed end-to-end clean, forced late-input correction,
prediction-horizon recovery, live desync, and fixed-delay regression routes.
It remains experimental: physical two-machine, cross-platform, strict-NAT, and
impaired-network validation are still outstanding, and Online Room has no relay,
authentication, encryption, room password, or IP hiding.
Packages are available from the Releases page:
| for | needs a toolchain? | |
|---|---|---|
RingOut-1.2.1-linux-x86_64.zip |
desktop Linux | yes — compiles on your machine |
RingOut-1.2.1-steamdeck-x86_64.zip |
Steam Deck / SteamOS | no — prebuilt |
RingOut-1.2.1-ell.12-linux-x86_64.AppImage |
Linux x86-64 rollback beta | yes — compiles on your machine |
RingOut-1.2.1-ell.12-windows-x86_64.zip |
Windows 10/11 x86-64 rollback beta | no — toolchain bundled |
The Deck package ships no module: build one on a desktop with the package below,
then copy game/ and bin/gGRSEAF_recomp.so across. Add RingOut to Steam as a
non-Steam game to launch it from Game Mode.
For desktop, unzip and run:
./RingOutOn first run it asks for your disc image (.iso / .gcm / .nkit.iso / .rvz),
then extracts and recompiles it — several minutes, once. Every run after that starts
straight away. You can also pass the image directly:
./RingOut /path/to/disc.iso # or: ./setup.sh /path/to/disc.isoOn Windows, extract the entire ZIP to a writable folder and double-click
RingOut.exe. Select a plain GameCube .iso or .wbfs image when prompted.
Do not run it from inside the ZIP. The launcher keeps extracted game data,
build work, settings, saves, and the private recompiled module under
%LOCALAPPDATA%\RingOut; the release folder itself remains read-only.
For the AppImage, make the download executable and run it:
chmod +x RingOut-1.2.1-ell.12-linux-x86_64.AppImage
./RingOut-1.2.1-ell.12-linux-x86_64.AppImageIts read-only image keeps generated files, saves and settings under
${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/ringout. Set RINGOUT_DATA_DIR to choose
another dedicated writable directory. On a system without FUSE, set
APPIMAGE_EXTRACT_AND_RUN=1, or use --appimage-extract and run the extracted
AppRun. Keep the adjacent checksummed
RingOut-1.2.1-ell.12-appimage-runtime-sources.tar.zst release asset available
with the AppImage; it contains the exact static-prefix source and libfuse
relink materials named by the image's SOURCE.txt.
- A GameCube disc image you already own
cmake,ninja,python3, andclang(orgcc)- Arch:
sudo pacman -S cmake ninja clang python - Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install cmake ninja-build clang python3
- Arch:
- A working Vulkan driver
- ~1.5 GB free for the extracted disc and build output
The experimental Windows package requires 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, PowerShell
5.1 or newer, a Vulkan-capable driver, and about 1.5 GB of writable space after
extraction. Its compiler toolchain is included; antivirus software can
occasionally quarantine clang.exe or lld.exe and may need an exception for
the extracted package folder.
The legacy desktop ZIP binary is built on glibc 2.44. For older hosts its
launcher falls back to a bundled glibc in libc-fallback/ — see
Known issues before relying on that. The AppImage runtime is
built on Debian 12 and validated with a glibc 2.36 symbol-version ceiling;
it does not replace the host's graphics drivers.
- Static recompilation — native x86-64 execution, no interpreter fallback
- Vulkan renderer with internal-resolution scaling, AA, anisotropic filtering
- Widescreen (16:9) —
Alt+W - HD texture pack support — drop a pack in
userdata/Load/Textures/GRSEAF/ - In-game overlay: pause menu with staged settings and Reset Game; Video, Audio, System, Controls and Cheats tabs
- Full controller remapping from the launcher's Settings page, with direct button/axis capture, immediate persistence, and one-click default restore
- Save states —
Shift+F1–F8to save,F1–F8to load - Free camera — fly the camera anywhere in a match
- Optional experimental FMV takeover via external FFmpeg; it is off by default because the ordinary emulated Sofdec path measured faster
- 23 verified cheat codes shipped in
GameSettings/GRSEAF.ini - Netplay — the
ell.9beta has live bounded prediction, correction, restore/replay, a Ready-gated lobby, and beta room-code rendezvous; fixed delay remains available as an Advanced Direct IP fallback - Its own icon — the disc banner and the memory-card icon are extracted from your disc and saves on your machine, and a desktop entry is written for you. None of that artwork ships; it is the publisher's.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Escape |
settings menu |
| Arrow keys | navigate; Left/Right change a value or switch tab |
Space / Enter |
confirm / activate |
| Controller Back/View (hold) | settings menu |
| Controller D-pad / A / B | navigate / activate / back |
Alt+W |
toggle widescreen |
Alt+Enter |
fullscreen |
F1–F8 / Shift+F1–F8 |
load / save state |
Shift+Escape |
quit |
Free camera (enable in the Video tab): Shift+WASD move, Shift+Q/E down/up,
Shift+arrows look, Shift+Z/C roll, Shift+1/2 speed, Shift+R reset.
In a beta package containing the integrated C++ launcher, open Netplay and:
- Enter a nickname. The host selects Host online room.
- Copy the eight-character code shown in the lobby and send it privately to the other player. The joiner enters it and selects Join online room.
- In the lobby, verify the requested mode, Same game, and one controller assignment per player. Each player selects Ready. Mapping, delay/mode, roster, or game changes clear readiness.
- When every mapped player is Ready, the host selects Start game.
Both players must have the same Ring Out code, compatible disc/DOL, generated module, rollback protocol, and CPU-state ABI identity. A mismatch is refused before lobby admission. Online Room uses Dolphin's hosted service only to exchange public UDP endpoints; gameplay remains direct P2P. It has no relay, authentication, encryption, room password, or IP hiding, so use it only with a trusted friend. Strict NATs may fail. Advanced: use Direct IP preserves the LAN/private-VPN fallback and its fixed-delay option.
Rollback games show Ping: N ms | Rollback: Nf in the game by default. Ping is
the highest current peer RTT; Rollback is the actual number of frames in the
current correction, with the recent peak held for one second so short
corrections are visible. Yellow means a 1-3 frame correction and red means 4 or
more. Disable Show in-game network stats in the launcher's Netplay page to
hide it. The overlay is never shown during solo or fixed-delay play.
Enable Detailed netplay diagnostics before reproducing a problem to add
Dolphin transport and handshake events to userdata/Logs/RingOut.log. The
launcher preserves the prior session as RingOut.previous.log and can copy the
current log path. Review logs before sharing: they can contain nicknames, room
codes, IP addresses, controller names, and local file paths.
Netplay starts only from the launcher in the ell.9 beta. The obsolete in-game
System-tab Host/Join/Scan rows were removed so they cannot lead players into a
different Direct-IP-only flow. Older released packages may still show those
rows and fixed-delay mode.
In rollback sessions, save data may be synchronized into the session, but rollback forcibly disables copying memory-card changes back to the user's save and disables writable SD/serial/GBA routes. Treat rollback-session progress as temporary. Fixed-delay remains the supported fallback: leave the lobby, switch both players to Fixed delay, and reconnect.
Rollback peers also submit a compact confirmed-state report every 60 logical
frames after input is authoritative and replay has committed. If those reports
differ, every peer stops with DESYNC instead of continuing a divergent match.
This detects errors; it does not authenticate or encrypt the direct connection.
The 2026-08-25 implementation commit 6518db52 production run passed after memory-card
protocol/content state was added to rollback snapshots, speculative output was
kept quarantined through fault/cancel/destruction quiescence, and corrected-
frontier publication failures were made hard coordinator/journal faults. With
runtime SHA-256
3a7e27d7420ac9ae49eca997e0301a972f3a3799997dcff9a2920f098b1351ee,
the guest committed corrections at restore/replay frames 25/27 and 137/137,
then matched all eleven confirmed logical-state checkpoints through frame 660
(/tmp/ringout-live-rollback.final-correction.OHN0EzDz). A clean production
route also passed (/tmp/ringout-live-rollback.final-clean.wPXzfTPg), as did the
fixed-delay whole-run oracle with 2,958 byte-identical rows
(/tmp/ringout-fixed-delay-final-3a7e). These are
strong Linux/source results underlying the ell.9 beta, but not physical or
cross-machine acceptance evidence. Hosted room-code rendezvous is implemented and its complete
control-plane exchange passes against stun.dolphin-emu.org; the same-machine
test did not receive the endpoint-directed punch, so a real two-network match
remains a beta release gate. Relay, authentication, encryption, and IP privacy
remain proposed in the connectivity plan.
During a match the overlay stays live without pausing either peer. Core-state controls (speed, pause, save/load/reset), controller rebinding, and cheats are locked; menu navigation is suppressed from the game while the overlay is open.
Codes ship disabled. The host's enabled AR/Gecko codes are synchronized to the guest before boot. Choose any unlock codes before starting: the Cheats tab is read-only during a match so one peer cannot change deterministic state alone. Unlock codes alter live emulated memory and do not guarantee permanent memory-card progression.
Everything below is measured on a fixed-work gameplay benchmark — the same emulated frames, driven by a frame-keyed input script, counted in retired CPU cycles rather than wall time. That harness exists because the earlier one did not measure the right thing: it ran boot and an idle menu, which carry ~0.1% of a real session's paired-single traffic, so a change could look free there and cost 3% in a match. Earlier figures in this README were taken that way and have been removed rather than restated.
| Change | Effect |
|---|---|
| Inline the paired-single helper chain | psq cost per unit of work −43% |
Compile loop back-edges as native goto |
dispatches −66%, CPU −11.5% |
| Defer FPRF classification until FPSCR is observable | −2.14% cycles (Deck) |
-flto=auto |
module relink 22 min → 6 |
The FPRF one is the shape most of these take: the FP condition register is written 3.07 billion times per run and read 15,885 times — mandatory by architecture, dead in practice — so it is now computed only where something can observe it, with frame hashes proving guest state is unchanged.
Kept here because the negative results cost as much to establish as the wins, and each one looks plausible enough to be retried:
| Idea | Result |
|---|---|
| BOLT post-link layout | 8.1% slower |
-O2 instead of -O3 |
9.1% slower, despite 12.5% less code |
| LLVM object backend | 4% slower, even removing 43% of dispatches |
| Profile-guided optimisation | does not build — SIGBUS before the first frame |
| Leaders-only entry labels | 81% of execution fell out to the interpreter |
| Block-local register allocation | tied; no cross-iteration residency to exploit |
| CR / XER[CA] elision | ceiling ~0.05% and ~0.2% respectively |
The pattern: BOLT, -O2 and the LLVM backend all bought instruction locality or
fewer dispatches, and all three lost by retiring more instructions at lower IPC.
PMU attribution explains why — front-end starvation is 2.4% of cycles and the
back end is saturated at IPC 1.92. The workload is not inefficient, just large:
86.4 million host instructions per emulated frame.
- The Deck package is SteamOS-only. Its runtime is built against glibc 2.36 in a Debian 12 container, which clears SteamOS and essentially every current distro. A build made natively on SteamOS instead has a 2.38 floor and will not run on older SteamOS releases — so the container build stays the shipped one.
- Windows support is experimental. Its MinGW cross-build uses Vulkan or OpenGL, Cubeb/OpenAL audio, and SDL input. Microsoft-SDK-only Direct3D, WASAPI, native Windows controller backends, and the native Bluetooth Wii Remote transport are omitted. QWave/DSCP traffic marking is also omitted; netplay itself remains available. The release is cross-built and Wine-smoked; physical Windows setup, gameplay, menu and two-peer netplay QA remains a recommended follow-up for every experimental prerelease.
- The
-march=nativebuild is machine-specific by design; setup compiles on your own machine, so this only matters if you copy a built folder to another CPU.
- Netplay was described here as stubbed out. It is not: there is a lobby with live ping and per-player game status, automatic pad assignment, and a host-controlled input buffer.
- The shutdown abort (
terminate called without an active exception) was a real bug rather than a cosmetic one, and is fixed. - The bundled-glibc fallback on SteamOS is no longer the plan. The predicted NSS failure is moot: the Deck package is built in a container against an old glibc instead, and is verified on hardware in both Desktop and Game Mode.
cmake -S ModernGekko -B ModernGekko/build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
ninja -C ModernGekko/buildThen build the recompiled module for your disc with dist/RingOut-1.0-dist/setup.sh,
which drives dolrecomp and compiles the generated C.
To cross-compile the Windows runtime and recompiler from Linux, install a 64-bit MinGW-w64 POSIX-thread toolchain, CMake and Ninja, then run:
On Ubuntu 24.04, use the explicit POSIX packages
gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64-posix and g++-mingw-w64-x86-64-posix. Ubuntu also
installs Win32-thread variants under the generic compiler names, so add
-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc-posix,
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++-posix, and
-DCMAKE_RC_COMPILER=/usr/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-windres to the configure
command there, as the release workflow does. Arch's MinGW package exposes the
POSIX compiler under the unsuffixed names used by the toolchain file.
cmake -S ModernGekko -B build-windows-cross -G Ninja \
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/toolchains/mingw-x86_64.cmake \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DUSE_SYSTEM_LIBS=OFF -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
-DENABLE_QT=OFF -DENABLE_TESTS=OFF \
-DENABLE_ANALYTICS=OFF -DENABLE_AUTOUPDATE=OFF
cmake --build build-windows-cross \
--target moderngekko-launcher moderngekko-port moderngekko-run dolrecomp \
--parallelThis cross-build deliberately excludes Windows backends that require the
Microsoft C++/WinRT SDK. The tag workflow in
.github/workflows/windows-cross.yml downloads checksum-pinned Windows-native
first-run tools, invokes .github/scripts/package-windows-cross.sh, validates
the PE import closure and privacy allowlist, and creates a draft prerelease.
Releases are assembled by script, never by zipping a working directory — those hold the extracted disc, saves and build output. Each stage is built from an allowlist and then checked: no disc-derived files, no personal data, and for the desktop package, that the prebuilt runtime can actually load a module built from the sources shipped beside it.
.github/scripts/package-deck.sh # Steam Deck zip
.github/scripts/package-dist.sh # desktop Linux zip
.github/scripts/package-windows-cross.sh --help
.github/scripts/package-appimage.sh --help
.github/scripts/package-appimage-runtime-sources.sh --help
.github/scripts/regen-source.sh # refresh the GPL source shipment| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
ModernGekko/ |
the runtime fork — chassis, settings overlay, StaticRecomp core |
ModernGekko/vendor/dolphin/ |
the vendored Dolphin tree the runtime is built from |
DolRecomp/ |
the static recompiler fork (PowerPC → C) |
dist/RingOut-1.0-dist/ |
the desktop redistributable: launcher, setup.sh, module build recipe |
dist/RingOut-1.0-deck/ |
the Steam Deck package scaffolding |
dist/windows/ |
version-neutral Windows launcher and first-run setup scaffolding |
dist/appimage/ |
version-neutral Linux AppImage entry point, metadata and documentation |
dist/shared/gc-art.py |
extracts the game's banner and icon on the player's machine |
.github/scripts/ |
packaging, the privacy scan, the GPL source shipment, benchmarks |
work/mg_userdir/GameSettings/GRSEAF.ini |
the verified cheat codes |
Everything is vendored as plain files — clone and build, no submodule init needed.
Almost none of the heavy lifting here is original. This is a thin layer on other people's work:
- Dolphin Emulator Project — the runtime is Dolphin. Graphics, audio, input, save states, GameCube hardware emulation and the Vulkan backend are all theirs. GPL-2.0-or-later.
- ExpansionPak — ModernGekko — the chassis that hosts a statically recompiled game inside Dolphin, and the StaticRecomp core that hands execution between recompiled code and the emulator.
- ExpansionPak — DolRecomp — the static recompiler. GPL-3.0-or-later.
- Dear ImGui (Omar Cornut and contributors) — the settings overlay UI. MIT.
- FFmpeg — optional external program for the developer-only FMV takeover; it is not bundled or used by ordinary playback.
- Bandai Namco Entertainment — the original game, its code and all its assets. Not included, not redistributed, and not ours. All rights remain theirs.
- Action Replay cheat codes are published community data (Codejunkies, via Almar's Guides). None were written here.
- The r/decomps post that described the recompilation workflow this project followed.
Assembled by Jack Poison, working with AI assistance (Anthropic's Claude). The AI wrote and debugged a large share of the code — the settings overlay, controller remapping and cheat pages, the free-camera wiring, the FMV replacement path, several recompiler codegen fixes and the packaging — under direction, with testing and decisions made by a human.
Project code covered by the root licence is GPL-2.0-or-later. See
LICENSE.
The runtime derives from Dolphin (GPL-2.0-or-later) and ModernGekko (GPL-3.0-or-later); DolRecomp is GPL-3.0-or-later. The portable Windows package ships these compatible works together and is distributed under GPLv3-compatible terms. Because the GPL obliges anyone receiving a binary to be able to get the matching source, the full Dolphin and recompiler trees are vendored in this repository rather than referenced.
ModernGekko/LICENSE and ModernGekko/vendor/dolphin/COPYING are upstream's own
terms and are left untouched.
An unofficial fan project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any of the projects or companies named above. No game data or game code is included, and none will be provided — do not ask. Anything setup builds from your disc is derived from the game itself; keep it to yourself.