OpenJam

A native PC port of NBA JAM: On Fire Edition (Xbox 360, XBLA, 2011), built with ReXGlue. Not an emulator: the original PowerPC code is statically recompiled to C++ ahead of time and compiled for x86-64.

It runs and it plays.

Playing it

You need your own copy of the game. NBA JAM: On Fire Edition was sold on Xbox Live Arcade, and a purchased copy sits on the console's drive as a single signed container file. Nothing here ships game content and nothing here will get you a copy.

On Windows, download the release, unzip it next to that container file, and run NBA JAM Mod Manager.exe. It unpacks the game, sets the folder up, and from then on it is the one window you need: install a mod, choose which one loads, play. See RELEASE.md for what is in the download and what it does.

Mods

The PS3 modding scene for this game is alive and its mods run here. They are published as PlayStation 3 packages; the manager opens one, converts its artwork into the format this build reads, and gives it a game folder and a save file of its own. Installed mods are listed on the game's own main menu, in the panel where JAMnet used to be:

Hold the left trigger and press Y there and the panel wakes up: the orange box becomes a cursor, A loads what it is on, and the game comes back up in that mod about fifteen seconds later.

johnz1's 1990s edition, in play:

Video settings

Options > Settings has a Video tab beside Audio, Gameplay and Privileges: windowed or fullscreen, resolution, sharpness (the game drawn at two or three times its own resolution), picture shape and vsync. Resolution and sharpness take effect the next time the game starts; the rest at once. Everything is kept in nbajam_ofe.toml beside the game.

Linux

There is a native Linux download. Unpack it, put your container file beside nbajam.sh and run that: the first time it unpacks the game, then starts it. Mods are installed from a terminal with ./mods.sh install <file.pkg>, using the same code as the Mod Manager; it needs only Python 3. The readme inside the download has the details.

It has played whole matches, mods included, on a software Vulkan driver in WSL. It has not yet been tried on a range of real graphics cards. Building it needs a patched SDK; see BUILDING.md.

Steam Deck

Either download works. The Windows release through Proton has the Mod Manager's window: add NBA JAM Mod Manager.exe to Steam as a non-Steam game, set it to run with Proton under Properties > Compatibility, and play from there; add nbajam_ofe.exe the same way to go straight into the game. Under Proton it starts fullscreen, and on a Steam Deck at 1280x800, the Deck's own screen, so the picture fills it. That route has been played through a whole match under Wine with vkd3d-proton and DXVK, which is what Proton runs it with. The native Linux download can be added the same way by pointing Steam at nbajam.sh. Neither has been run on a Deck itself yet.

What this repository contains

The port project only — the configuration, hand-written source, and the tooling built along the way. It contains no game content. You need your own copy of the title; the build reads an extracted XBLA package and never redistributes it.

Path	What it is
nbajam_ofe_manifest.toml	Entry point for codegen
nbajam_ofe_config.toml	Hand-derived function boundaries
nbajam_ofe_gaps.toml	Functions recovered from gaps discovery missed
src/	Kernel stubs, diagnostics, instruction fixups, the mod chooser, the app class
tools/	Gap recovery, guest debugging, the post-codegen instruction repair, the mod pipeline and the manager
templates/	One codegen template override
RELEASE.md	What a release contains and what a player has to provide

generated/ (≈166 MB, 5.7M lines) and out/ are reproducible and not tracked.

See BUILDING.md for the toolchain, the build, how to run it, and a full account of every local change and why it exists.

Status

Boots to gameplay, and runs as the full version rather than a trial. Roughly 53,000 recompiled functions register with none rejected; all 320 kernel imports resolve; graphics, audio, input and the achievement store all initialize. The EA Sports intro video decodes correctly.

PS3 mods run on it. All three published ones install from their original packages and play.

Known rough edges: the Xenos backend logs a stream of "invalid" texture fetch constant warnings during play, and memmap:\clips\ is unmapped.

Notes

The eventual target is an original Xbox port, which inverts most of the constraints — 64 MB unified memory against the 360's 512 MB, one 733 MHz Pentium III against three 3.2 GHz PowerPC cores, fixed-function-era shaders against the Xenos. This PC build exists to establish a correct reference to diff against.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by EA, the NBA, or Microsoft. For preservation and educational purposes.