Flipendo
About the project
Flipendo es un videojuego de acci�n y aventura, lanzado en 2001.
Official project information
Flipendo is one engine for KnowWonder's first two Harry Potter games on PC, built on SurrealEngine, an open-source reimplementation of Unreal Engine 1:
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone in the US; 2001): finished, the whole story plays through.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002): work in progress. It starts and plays its first cutscenes; it isn't playable through yet.
Point it at your installed game and it plays that game. The levels, scripts, voices and music all come from your own installation; Flipendo replaces only the engine underneath them.
You need your own copy of the game. Flipendo contains no game data.
Everything below is about Philosopher's Stone unless it says otherwise; Chamber of Secrets has its own status section.
Why play it this way?
The 2001 release is getting hard to run. SafeDisc copy protection doesn't work on Windows 10/11, the menus stop at 1024x768 and widescreen needs community patches. Flipendo fixes all of that without touching your game files:
- Any resolution, real widescreen. 1080p, 1440p, 4K, ultrawide. The view gets wider instead of being cropped, the HUD and cutscene bars fill the screen, and the menu book keeps its shape.
- Modern renderer. Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12 or OpenGL instead of Direct3D 7.
- No disc, no SafeDisc, no compatibility patches. Point it at the installed game folder.
- The same game. Nothing is remade or altered. Optional extras (skippable cutscenes and storybooks, fast forward) can all
be switched off with
--vanilla, or one at a time with--no-mod=<id>. - Fixable. Bugs in the original engine get fixed in source (list).
- Windows, Linux and macOS.
Screenshots
All taken in Flipendo at 1920x1080 from the original game files.
<table> <tr> <td><img src="images/screenshots/dumbledore.jpg" alt="Dumbledore welcomes Harry to Hogwarts"></td> <td><img src="images/screenshots/hagrid.jpg" alt="Hagrid in the castle grounds"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="images/screenshots/castle-grounds.jpg" alt="Harry in the castle grounds, widescreen HUD"></td> <td><img src="images/screenshots/corridor.jpg" alt="A Hogwarts corridor with stained glass windows"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="images/screenshots/quidditch-pitch.jpg" alt="The Quidditch pitch"></td> <td><img src="images/screenshots/quidditch-fireworks.jpg" alt="Particle effects over the Quidditch stands"></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><img src="images/screenshots/dungeon.jpg" alt="Harry in a torch-lit dungeon corridor"></td> </tr> </table>Status
Philosopher's Stone: finished
The whole story has been played through, start to finish, in Flipendo (October 2026). Download it for Windows, Linux or macOS. Follow progress in
ROADMAP.md.
| ✅ Works | The whole story, every level from the first lesson to the final encounter with Voldemort, tested by playing it through. Menus and options (incl. key rebinding), widescreen at any resolution, music, cutscenes, characters and their animations, spells and particle effects, doors, NPCs, Peeves, jelly beans, wizard cards, saving and loading |
| 🐧 Linux | Plays (tested on Fedora) |
| 🍎 macOS | Plays on Apple Silicon (tested on macOS 26) |
| ⚪ Not tested | The Quidditch League |
Playtesters are welcome: anything that looks or behaves differently from the original is a useful bug report.
Chamber of Secrets: needs a playtest
Most of the engine work is shared with the first game, so Chamber of Secrets reuses it; what differs is being ported now. Development is moving quickly, so we don't know exactly how close it is to the original yet: parts we haven't played through may already work, and others may not. It needs a full playtest; the roadmap has what we know about.
If you play it, build from source (below) and point it at your Chamber of Secrets folder (retail 1.0, the one with
system/Game.exe). Please report what works and what doesn't, with where you got to in the game.
How to play
What you need
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's / Sorcerer's Stone for PC (2001), installed: the folder with
System/,Maps/,Textures/and so on. Known versions: UK 1.1, EN retail and a community No-CD, Russian (EA Hit-Parade) and its No-CD. If yours isn't recognised, the error shows a code (SHA-1); please report it. - Or Chamber of Secrets for PC (2002), to playtest it.
- Windows 10/11, Linux (a distribution from 2024 or later), or a Mac with Apple Silicon.
Get it running
Download the zip for your system from the releases page
and unzip it anywhere. On Windows, drag your game folder onto SurrealEngine.exe; on Linux and macOS, copy the game
folder from a Windows install (or the disc) and start it as README-first.txt in the zip says.
To build it yourself instead (a few minutes), you need Visual Studio 2026 with the Desktop development with C++ workload, and Git for Windows. In Git Bash:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/kroplabeskidu/flipendo
cd flipendo
tools/build.sh
build/Release/SurrealEngine.exe "C:/Games/Harry Potter"
The last line opens the game; use your own install folder in place of C:/Games/Harry Potter. If it doesn't start, the error says which file or folder is
missing: see troubleshooting.
On Linux, copy the game folder from a Windows install (or the disc) and build it like this; the packages to install first are in CONTRIBUTING.md:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/kroplabeskidu/flipendo
cd flipendo
bash tools/apply_patches.sh
cmake -S src/engine -B build-linux -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build-linux --target SurrealEngine
build-linux/SurrealEngine ~/Games/HarryPotter
Launch options
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
--skip-splash | skip the logo screens (already the default; this one works with --vanilla too, like --mod=splash-skip) |
--skip-intro | New Game goes straight to the first level (same as --mod=intro-skip) |
--vanilla | turn off every extra the original doesn't have |
--no-mod=<id,...>, --mod=<id,...> | turn single extras off or on, e.g. --no-mod=improved-movement or --vanilla --mod=fast-forward |
--list-mods | list the extras with their ids and whether they are on |
--logfile=flipendo.log | write a log file (attach it to bug reports) |
Donate
Flipendo is free and always will be. If you'd like to support the work, crypto donations are welcome:
| Coin | Address |
|---|---|
| BTC (SegWit) | bc1qke3zv2s8enm70qy4vws33zm6vldux4c3jc3k3r |
| XMR | 41mdy9DgDSTVZ6idttunmRCv5pggWMMzbYY4dDCP2YHVAswRPeWQXsLRanoXwoiUUfC5Zm8svzRZi8hrwww7y3q9K9cWB1d |
| LTC | ltc1q2pzx25jmlx33zlrsznsnsqq50l2alf4xjhgtc3 |
Extras and mods
Most are for Philosopher's Stone (HP1); the Games column says which also work in Chamber of Secrets (HP2), whose own
cutscene skip (Enter) is part of the original game. The faithful port and the additions are kept apart: an extra never
changes how the game plays unless it is switched on, and --vanilla switches all of them off. --no-mod=<id> switches
one off, --mod=<id> one on (ids below, or --list-mods).
| Extra | Id | Games | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cutscene skip | cutscene-skip | HP1 | on | "Press Space to skip" during cutscenes |
| Storybook skip | storybook-skip | HP1 | on | "Press Space to skip" in storybooks (New Game intro, chapter interludes) |
| Fast forward | fast-forward | HP1, HP2 | on | hold Shift to play 2.5x as fast |
| Discord status | discord | HP1 | on | friends on Discord see which level you're in and Gryffindor's house points |
| 60 FPS cap | frame-limit | HP1, HP2 | on | the game runs at most 60 frames a second, as the original was played (some of its movement goes wrong at high frame rates); --fps=<n> for another limit, --fps=0 for none |
| Improved movement | improved-movement | HP1 | on | HP2's controls: Left / Right strafe and the mouse turns (in the air too), Harry keeps moving while you hold a spell (the mouse aims it; he can jump with it or start one in the air, and climbs again once it is cast), the mouse looks up and down while you move, a ledge caught mid-jump is climbed at once, and AdamJD's smaller tweaks (even diagonal air control, softer blends, spells that hit a creature at once from up close). Saves work with it on or off |
| Map fixes | path-fixes | HP1 | on | fixes broken paths in the original maps (Peeves now flies off after the Lev_Tut3b duel instead of drifting through the walls) |
| Texture packs | texture-overrides | HP1, HP2 | on | .dds files in Textures/<package>/<group>/<name>.dds replace the game's textures: the layout of the DirectX 11 renderer's texture packs, such as the ESRGAN Upscale Pack (unpack it into the game folder) |
| Splash skip | splash-skip | HP1, HP2 | on | no logo screens at start: HP1 opens on the main menu, HP2 on its start menu |
| Intro skip | intro-skip | HP1 | off | New Game goes straight to the first level |
More is coming (an in-game page to switch these, more extras): see the roadmap, and docs/modding.md to write a mod today.
Community
- Bugs and ideas: open an issue. Include your game version, what you did, and the log (
--logfile=...). - Help out: playtesting, modding, C++. Most of it needs no programming: CONTRIBUTING.md. Reverse engineering isn't open to outside help.
- Android port (unofficial): someone ported Flipendo to Android in a fork, flipendo-droid. It isn't part of this project: I haven't reviewed it and don't endorse it. Try it at your own discretion. Thank you to its author for the work!
Legal
Flipendo's own code is copyright 2026 the Flipendo authors and open source under the
GNU General Public License, version 3: free to use, modify and share, as long as what you share keeps its
source open under the same licence. src/engine/ is SurrealEngine (zlib licence). Flipendo is an independent project, not
affiliated with or endorsed by SurrealEngine, EA, Warner Bros. or KnowWonder; please report problems here, not to
SurrealEngine. It is a reimplementation written from studying how the original game behaves (its scripts, data and
binaries), so that the game's own files run on a new engine. It contains no Epic, EA or KnowWonder code or data.
Harry Potter is a trademark of Warner Bros. Entertainment. The game data is copyright EA / KnowWonder and is not included.