Breath of Fire III — PC Port

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A renovation / overhaul of the 2001 Chinese PC port of Breath of Fire III: fix its bugs, modernise its platform, and consolidate QOL features that people have been adding over the years (simple cheats, difficulty mods, etc.)

**Status: Decompilations efforts are effectively completed. The original port's BOF3.exe has been replaced by our own bof3x.exe, which loads the game with no code of Capcom's, only art and data assets. All that remains is testing. (state 3, docs/state3-build.md).

The game can be installed from the 2001 PC port, from a PlayStation disc alone, or from a PSP disc alone, and is playable in English, French, German and Japanese.

This doc is mostly hand-written and edited now to keep it readable - the AI written status is kept in docs/STATUS.md; every document is indexed in docs/README.md; every deliberate change to the game is in docs/DIVERGENCE.md.

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Highlights

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the things that have changed ->

• Install From What You Own: the importer builds one game asset cache from any mix of the PC port, the PlayStation discs, and the PSP discs. A PlayStation disc alone or a PSP disc alone is a complete install, with no PC files at all.
• Localizations: the game uses the scripts of the copy you install it from. Most of my time has been spent on English testing, a little on Japanese, and lots of automated testing on the Chinese. If you have multiple installs, the localization choice is a dropdown in the launcher.
• Music: when available, the game uses the PlayStation's own sequenced music played by a rebuilt synthesizer. You can also choose the PSP's audio or the PC's audio by dropdowns in the launcher. There's also a...
• A Jukebox in the launcher! I matched the songs to their names in the OST for easy searching.
• Version Change Choice: if you installed from both a PSX and PSP copy of the game, you can choose which version changes to run with. For instance, you could run with the original Stallion colors, but still steal Ivory Dice from Myria.
• Display: choose between a PSX 4:3, PSP 16:9 (widened fully, not vertically cropped like the original), or a comically large 21:9 Ultrawide.
• Looks: the port originally used a smooth filter, so the launcher now offers a choice of that, a sharp point filter, or the SatPixie shader.
• Controls: modern pads through SDL3
• Fixes and QOL Changes: Oh so many! Take a look at the divergence doc if you'd like to see an exhaustive list of changes that have been made.

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Building and Running

You need a legally owned copy of the game: the Chinese PC port (BOF3.exe, 2001-04-18 - the launcher checks its SHA-256 and refuses any other build), or a PlayStation or PSP disc image of Breath of Fire III. Nothing you own is modified; everything the game reads is built on your machine from your own copies.

There is an alpha build packaged with the necessary external Python dependencies and a quick GUI. The goal is to sunset it eventually, but it is working for now.

For the documentation on the scripted process, please refer to docs/install_process.md

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Decompilation Target

The shipped BOF3.exe (2,584,576 bytes, 2001-04-18), measured:

• 32-bit x86, MSVC 6.0, no packing, fixed image base 0x400000 — native code, there is no CPU to emulate
• ~590,900 instructions in .text; ~2,950 functions found by static discovery, 10,246 starts in all once functions reached only through a pointer are counted.
• 101 imported symbols across 7 DLLs — DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, MCI, user32/gdi32, and the MSVC6 CRT. The entire host platform to reimplement fits on one page.
• It is a compilation of the same C source tree as the PlayStation release, which is what lets names and findings transfer from the sibling project (docs/SHARED_SOURCE.md).

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The Approach

Incremental decompilation into a hybrid binary, the OpenRCT2 / OpenLoco model: load the original executable in-process, replace one function at a time with readable C++, delete original code paths as subsystems complete. The last of the game's own functions was replaced in October 2026, and since then our bof3x.exe runs the game without Capcom's executable. It reads only the data tables, from the player's BOF3.exe or from a disc (docs/platform-layers-plan.md).

This project relies heavily on AI for coding, because my experience is with databases and .Net, less Python, and very little memory fiddling in languages like assembly or C / C++. However, I have drawn a line in the sand for myself that as much as I rely on AI to write code, it won't be generating new assets for the game. I love this game, every pixel and jazz chord and odd translation choice - I want to keep it itself. If something can't be done without altering assets or drawing new ones, it won't be done.

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Shoutouts

• bof3ext and bof3ext_resources by TheRealBiggs — used a replacement ddraw.dll that translates most of the game to English, fixes bugs, and replaces the renderer with OpenGL. Big inspiration for me starting my project docs/PLAN.md §4.

• BreathOfFire3Recomp — This is less a shoutout to myself and more to the psxrecomp team - their AI tooling is what opened up the ability to go back and renovate the PC port. The various documentation on PSX functionality and decomp examples remains invaluable when pieces of the PC port were unrecoverable / shipped broken.

• OpenRCT2 — absolutely the coolest project there is, going strong since 2014. Their pattern / development plan served as the guide for how this project could begin.

Legal

No game data is distributed here and none may be committed — see .gitignore. You need a legally owned copy of the game: the Chinese PC port, or the PlayStation or PSP release. Everything built from game data is built on the player's machine from the player's own copies.

This repository is licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. It is an independent interoperability and preservation effort, not affiliated with or endorsed by Capcom. Third-party code it carries (SDL3, the SatPixie shader, minimp3) is listed with its notices in docs/THIRD_PARTY.md.

docs/LICENSING.md explains why that licence and what follows from it — including why no copyleft source is vendored here.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md. Three rules matter most: never commit game data, ledger every intentional behavioural change, and cite the measurement behind every claim. Commits must be signed off (git commit -s); CI checks it.