[PROTOTYPE] and [PROTOTYPE 2] for Nintendo Switch

Русский

Native Nintendo Switch ports of the Xbox 360 versions of Prototype (2009) and Prototype 2 (2012), made by static recompilation with ReXGlue: the games' PowerPC code is translated to C++ and compiled to ARM64 for Horizon OS, and their Direct3D command stream is drawn with Vulkan (NVK/Mesa). No emulator, no Xbox 360 GPU emulation.

Free. Not for sale. News: t.me/fspores

This repository has no game files. You need your own copy of the Xbox 360 games.

Download

Ready builds (NROs, settings, HOME-menu NSP forwarders): see Releases.

What you get

	Prototype	Prototype 2
Port	this project (fungalspores)	penettrator 0.2.0, built from his sources with our fixes
Picture	720x400 + FSR 1, adjustable (640 to 1280)	800x448 + FSR 1, adjustable (640 to 1200)
FPS*	menus and cutscenes 30-60, gameplay 22-30 (lows 17 instead of 9 since 1.4.0)	city 25-30
Sound	yes	yes
Saves	yes (fixed)	yes

* Switch Lite (Mariko) with Horizon OC at CPU 1963 / GPU 1152 / RAM 2333 MHz. Lower at stock clocks.

Install

Needs Atmosphère 1.8.0+ with sigpatches, DBI (or another NSP installer), ~7 GB (Prototype) and ~8 GB (Prototype 2) on the SD card. FAT32 is fine.

1. Copy switch/ from the release to the root of the SD card:

   sdmc:/switch/prototype-nx/prototype.nro, prototype.toml
   sdmc:/switch/prototype2-nx/prototype2.nro, prototype2.toml
   

2. Put your game files there:

   • Prototype → sdmc:/switch/prototype-nx/game/ (with default.xex inside)
   • Prototype 2 → sdmc:/switch/prototype2-nx/game_root/ (with default.xex inside)

   From an ISO: extract-xiso -x "Prototype.iso" -d game. $SystemUpdate is not needed.

3. Install both NSPs from nsp/ with DBI and start the games from the HOME menu. They start through rex-start.nro: it shows the game for five seconds, and + opens its settings (the internal resolution) written straight into the game's TOML. Without an NSP: hold R while starting any installed game and pick the port in the Homebrew menu. Not from the Album: applet mode does not have enough memory.

Tested editions

• Prototype: Xbox 360, title ID 4156084E (Russian edition).
• Prototype 2: default.xex SHA-256 f6caf82c433b0bb20fe701912388b1e7ee8d6b529d8fc275af960ac2e9ddcab8.

The code is recompiled from one specific default.xex; other editions may not start.

Settings

prototype.toml / prototype2.toml next to the NRO. Restart the game after a change.

Setting	Prototype	Prototype 2
internal resolution	proto_render_width x _height 720x400	p2_render_width x _height 800x448	the game itself draws into the smaller frame (scene, depth, effects); FSR scales it to the screen. The height rounds down to a multiple of 16
p2_native_max_anisotropy	1	2
p2_native_shadow_max_cascades	2	4	shadow cascades (4 = the game's own)
p2_ped_max_scale, p2_vehicle_max_scale	-	0.15, 0.15	pedestrians and cars (1.0 = the game's own); crowds cost the most CPU

user_language: 12 Russian, 1 English (depends on your copy).

Prototype 2 runs on all four CPU cores and heats the console more than the first game. With Horizon OC / sys-clk, give it (0150524F54320000) its own clock profile. Do not use high overclocks on an Erista (original) console.

Settings screen (rex-start/)

A small homebrew between the HOME icon and the port, after winenx-start: libnx framebuffer, the console's own font through FreeType, no SDL. It offers the internal resolution only (Prototype 640 to 1280, Prototype 2 640x352 to 1200x672, Silent Hill: Downpour too) and copies every other line through untouched (quotes and line endings included); the height follows the width it is paired with. Press nothing and the game starts as before.

What we fixed

Prototype (port from scratch, ReXGlue + the masseffect-nx Horizon SDK + the Prototype 2 NX native renderer):

• Hangs in cutscenes, transitions and after the pause menu: the main thread held the scene critical sections while waiting for the render thread to drain the full command ring, and the render thread needed them. The main thread now releases the critical sections it owns while it waits (src/proto_deadlock_fix.cpp); the render thread drains in place when the ring fills during its own drain.
• "Corrupted" saves: the game writes the save file's size into its first word and checks it on load; the SDK returned the size cached when the file was opened (0). Fixed in XFile::Write / SetLength.
• Console signature stubs (XeKeysConsolePrivateKeySign / ...SignatureVerification) returned "invalid".
• Profile-guided optimization with our own profile: an instrumented build writes /pgo-proto on the SD card (src/proto_pgo.cpp, -DPROTO_PGO=GEN), a play session leaves the counters, and the release is built with -DPROTO_PGO=USE -DPROTO_PGO_DATA=<dir>.
• Adjustable internal render size: the game hard-codes a 1280x720 back buffer in sub_82A0E118; tools/prepare_proto_codegen.py routes it to proto_render_width / proto_render_height.
• The renderer updated to the one from Prototype 2 0.2.0 (texture cache with eviction, batched occlusion queries, materials no longer disappear after leaving the map open).
• Per-address locks instead of one process-wide mutex for the game's lwarx/stwcx. regions; guest memory accesses without volatile (from Prototype 2 NX); audio, 30-60 FPS menus with the native renderer.

Prototype 2 (penettrator's port, built from his GPL-3.0 sources):

• The same SDK fixes (saves, signatures, critical sections).
• A better picture (see Settings).
• No temperature-sensor polling: an open ts session for the whole game coincided with Horizon OC's hoc:clk crashing under load (and pcv/ptm/Bus after it).

Prototype, 1.4.0 (Prototype 2 in the 1.4.0 release is the 1.3.0 build; the same changes made it softer and slower there and are not shipped for it yet):

• PGO is back. Releases 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 were built without the profile by mistake (the release builds came from a build directory configured without it); tools/make_release.sh now refuses a build without the profile.
• Speed patches from mgr-nx-deko on the generated code (tools/mgr/): a guest stwcx. is __atomic_compare_exchange_n instead of __sync_bool_compare_and_swap, which GCC follows with a dmb ish on the A57 (611 barriers after a store-exclusive in Prototype, 24 left); the 16-byte byte reversal of every vector load and store is REV64 + EXT that GCC folds into one constant TBL, instead of a mask load, an AND and a TBL (vector ANDs 9687 -> 1770); constant word shuffles are one permutation instead of a chain of lane inserts. The lowest frame rate in fights went from about 9 to 17 fps.
• The pipeline cache and the prewarm list are fsync'd before the rename: leaving through HOME lost the session's compiled pipelines, and the next start compiled them again. A splash with the credit is shown for 3 seconds before each game (skip with A/B/+).

Building

Everything was built on an Android phone (Alpine Linux in PRoot, aarch64) without Docker; a normal Linux box works the same way. Outline:

1. devkitA64: tools/proot/pull_dka64.py unpacks the arm64 devkitpro/devkita64 image; on musl hosts run tools/proot/patch_dkp.sh and wrap_dkp.sh (cc1/cc1plus/lto1 must stay unpatched, called through ld-linux).
2. SDK: masseffect-nx at a85b0b4 + patches/rexglue-sdk-masseffect-nx.patch; third-party sources with its tools/fetch_thirdparty.py (rexglue-sdk v0.10.0). Host rexglue: cmake -S sdk -B out/host -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -DREXGLUE_ENABLE_TRACY=OFF && ninja -C out/host rexglue (on musl add -lucontext_posix -lucontext; without /dev/shm run it with LD_PRELOAD of tools/proot/shmshim.c).
3. Mesa/NVK: mesa-switch at d4a00ea0ab3 + patches/mesa-switch.patch, then tools/proot/mesa_p2_build.sh (needs meson >= 1.7, Rust nightly + rust-src + rustfmt, a dynamically linked bindgen 0.73+, mesa_clc/vtn_bindgen2 from a native Mesa build).
4. Prototype: prototype/build.sh (codegen ~1-2 min, NRO ~10-35 min). PGO: build once with -DPROTO_PGO=GEN, play 10-15 minutes, copy sdmc:/pgo-proto off the console and build again with -DPROTO_PGO=USE -DPROTO_PGO_DATA=<that folder> from the same build directory.
5. Prototype 2: as in penettrator's docs/BUILD.en.md: codegen of project/prototype2_manifest.toml, then tools/prepare_switch_codegen.py, prepare_no_volatile.py, prepare_switch_hot.py and cmake -S switch -B build/switch ... -DP2_DIRECT_CALLS=ON -DP2_GUEST_LTO=ON -DP2_LEAF_LOCALS=ON -DP2_ARM_VMX=ON (~25 min with LTO).
6. Settings screen: rex-start/build.sh (devkitA64 + FreeType from the portlibs).
7. NSP forwarders: forwarder/build_forwarder.py --launcher sdmc:/switch/rex-start.nro --nro sdmc:/switch/prototype-nx/prototype.nro --icon art/icon_prototype.jpg --title Prototype --author fungalspores --version 1.4.0 --tid 0150524F54310000 --keys <your prod.keys> --out out/ (needs Forwarder-Mod 9853bd9 cloned to forwarder/loader). Your own prod.keys only; never publish them.

Credits

• penettrator — the Prototype 2 port (prototype2-nx). Thank you!
• NebadasSwifty — masseffect-nx, the SDK with the Horizon layer.
• StevensND — the Horizon layer of ReXGlue and nfsmw-nx.
• R-drg — project8-sw, the base of the native renderer.
• tuancapoo: mgr-nx-deko, the post-codegen speed passes in tools/mgr/.
• Tom Clay and the ReXGlue SDK; the Xenia project.
• danfromtico — mesa-switch; the Mesa project.
• Skywalker25 — Forwarder-Mod; switchbrew (libnx); devkitPro.
• AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.

License

GPL-3.0 (see LICENSE); third-party components under their own licenses (prototype2/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md). Prototype is a trademark of its owners. This project is not affiliated with Radical Entertainment, Activision, Microsoft or Nintendo and contains none of their files.