The Maw — Linux Recompilation

A native Linux port of the Xbox 360 XBLA game The Maw (Twisted Pixel, 2009), built with the ReXGlue SDK static recompiler — the same toolchain family as 'Splosion Man, Dante's Inferno and Condemned 2.

Status: playable on Linux — title screen, "Retrieving Data", settings save, level transitions, enemy spawns and Bulb Valley progression all verified by playing, on Kubuntu (AMD RX 6600 / RADV), with graphics, PipeWire audio, controller + vibration, and FSR upscaling. Windows build: in progress via GitHub Actions (see .github/workflows/windows.yml) — the launcher compiles; the game build is being brought up the same way 'Splosion Man's was.

No game data is included in this repository or its releases. You must supply your own legally obtained copy of the game: the XBLA package for title ID 584108C2, or a folder containing default.xex extracted from it. The TP launcher (below) can import and extract the XBLA package for you. The Maw is © Twisted Pixel Games / Microsoft. This is a fan-made interoperability project; do not redistribute game assets.

Download

Linux builds ship as an AppImage plus a folder zip (see Releases): extract, chmod +x the AppImage, run — the launcher auto-detects your game folder (~/Games, mounted drives, next to the launcher) or lets you pick it, and its Import XBLA Package button extracts a stock XBLA package into a ready-to-play folder. Requirements: a distro with glibc 2.43 (the current packages are built on a recent toolchain — older-distro rebuilds are on the roadmap), Vulkan drivers for your GPU, and PipeWire or PulseAudio.

The launcher

The TP Maw Launcher is a bespoke Qt6 launcher shared with the 'Splosion Man port (tp-launcher/ in this repo, per-game themed from one codebase):

• Game tab: detection status, one-click XBLA package import (built-in STFS extractor — no external tools), PLAY.
• 23 settings in four explained sections (Graphics / Audio / Storage & Logs / Advanced), each with a plain-language note on what it does: resolution scale 720p→4K, FSR or bilinear presentation, FXAA, MSAA, VSync, frame limit, audio gain and routing, your choice of save-data and log locations — plus a Reset to Defaults button.
• Settings persist between runs; the exact command line assembled for every launch is written to last-command.txt next to the logs.

Building from source

You need: the ReXGlue SDK (pinned commit, with the house patches and FidelityFX enabled), clang 20, Qt6 dev, Vulkan headers, and PipeWire + SPA development headers — without them SDL silently builds without a PipeWire audio backend and the game has no sound on PipeWire systems. (Ask us how we know.)

1. Clone the SDK at f5337cdc947ff6d4c4196737e2c807a48f2a1fc2, init its submodules, and apply patches/house-sdk.patch (git apply, 57 files — the accumulated house fixes: input threading, codegen discovery, shader-cache and presentation work).
2. Codegen from your own default.xex (or use the included generated/): rexglue codegen. If you re-run codegen you must redo the post-processing dance before the tree will build and play: build once, run scripts/fix-codegen-maw.py, run scripts/patch-epilogue.py, build again. The generated/ tree in this repo is already in that post-dance state — it's the tree that produced the shipping Linux build.
3. Build the game: CMake preset linux-amd64-release on Linux, win-amd64-release on Windows, with -DREXSDK_DIR=<sdk tree> -DREXGLUE_ENABLE_FIDELITYFX=ON. (FidelityFX defaults OFF and fails silently — the game just looks blurry. Check for it.)
4. Build the launcher in tp-launcher/ (CMake, Qt6, -DTP_GAME=maw).

Note: never mix the executable and librexruntime.so / librexgpu-xenos.so (or their Windows .dll counterparts) from different build sets — it corrupts the heap.

Known landmine: /dev/shm leaks (Linux)

The runtime backs guest memory with a ~4.8 GB xenia_memory_* file in /dev/shm per run. Crashed or killed runs leak these files; when /dev/shm fills, new runs die with a bus error (exit code 7) immediately after "Guest memory arena mapped". The TP launchers vacuum stale files before launching; if you're running the game directly, check df -h /dev/shm and remove stale files belonging to dead processes: rm /dev/shm/xenia_memory_*.

Also: a crash while the shader cache writes can poison it — if the game starts freezing on transitions, delete the cache subfolder under your save-data location (your saves live elsewhere and are safe).

Credits & disclosure

• Twisted Pixel Games — for The Maw, and for Frank.
• ReXGlue SDK team and upstream rexglue contributors — the recompiler and runtime that make this possible.
• The TP launcher is an original, clean-room design built for the Twisted Pixel ports (extraction, detection and settings model informed by the house's earlier launcher work on the Dante's Inferno and Condemned 2 recompilations).
• This port was built by Jason Hixon with heavy AI assistance (Muse, by Meta) on the coding side, and tested the old-fashioned way: by playing it. The bugs were real, the Maw got fed.