Fallout 1 (CE Port) — PlayStation 3

A native PlayStation 3 homebrew port of Fallout 1, built on Fallout Community Edition.

This is not an emulator: the engine is cross-compiled for the Cell PPU and renders through an RSX-accelerated SDL2 backend. No CFW required — the package installs on any PS3 running PS3HEN. It also runs under RPCS3.

Screenshots

Status

Area	State
Engine (game logic, DAT archives, save/load)	✅
Rendering (640×480 via RSX)	✅
Audio (music, sound effects, speech)	✅
MVE movies (intro and cutscenes)	✅
Gamepad (cursor emulation + full button map)	✅
Text input (PS3 on-screen keyboard)	✅
USB mouse and keyboard	✅
Hi-res patch	❌ Not supported (native 640×480)

Verified on real hardware (PS3 FAT with PS3HEN) and on RPCS3.

Requirements

• Docker (Linux containers) — the toolchain and every build step run inside the image, so no host-side SDK installation is needed.
• A legal copy of Fallout 1 (GOG / Steam / Epic). Neither this repository nor the packages it produces contain any game data.
• To play: a PS3 with PS3HEN, or RPCS3 with official firmware installed.

Installing

1. Install the package:
   • PS3: copy fallout-ce.gnpdrm.pkg to the root of a USB drive and install it from the console's Package Installer.
   • RPCS3: File → Install Packages, select fallout-ce.pkg.
2. Copy your game data into the installed directory:

/dev_hdd0/game/FALL1CE00/USRDIR/
    ├── MASTER.DAT
    ├── CRITTER.DAT
    ├── DATA/
    └── fallout.cfg      (optional)

Take these from the root of your PC installation. Use FTP or USB on a real console; under RPCS3 you can copy straight into its dev_hdd0 folder. No further configuration is required — saves are written to DATA/SAVEGAME/ inside the same directory.

Building from source

1. Toolchain image (one time)

docker build -t ps3dev -f docker/Dockerfile .

The cross-compilers are built from source, so expect 1.5–2 hours. Exporting the finished image afterwards saves that time if Docker ever prunes it:

docker save ps3dev -o ps3dev-image.tar     # restore with: docker load -i ps3dev-image.tar

2. Engine

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/src -w /src/fallout1-ce ps3dev bash -c \
  'cmake -B build-ps3 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/toolchain/ps3.cmake && cmake --build build-ps3 -j'

Output: fallout1-ce/build-ps3/fallout-ce (big-endian PowerPC64 ELF64).

3. Package

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/src -w /src/pkg ps3dev make

Two packages are written to build/: fallout-ce.pkg for RPCS3 and fallout-ce.gnpdrm.pkg for retail consoles running HEN. The title ID (FALL1CE00) matches the data path compiled into the engine, so the EBOOT and the game data end up in the same directory.

For local testing you may drop game data into pkg/pkgfiles/USRDIR/ to have it bundled into the package. That directory is not tracked by git, and a package built this way must not be redistributed.

Controls

Input	Action
Left stick	Cursor
Right stick	Scroll map
✕	Left click (action / move)
○	Right click (cycle cursor mode)
R2 (hold)	3× cursor speed
R1	Cycle weapon mode
L1	Swap active hand (slot 1 ↔ 2)
L2	End turn (combat)
Square	Inventory
Triangle	Character screen
D-pad ↑ / ↓	PIP-Boy / Skilldex
D-pad ← / →	Enter combat / End combat
Start / Select	Game menu / Automap
L3 + R3	Reserved

The cursor sits on the left stick so the right thumb stays on ✕ during drag-and-drop, which the inventory relies on.

Wherever the game expects typed text — character name, save description, the "Tell me about" dialogue field — the PS3 on-screen keyboard opens automatically, pre-filled with the current contents. Confirming replaces the field; cancelling falls back to regular keyboard input, so a USB keyboard still works.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
docker/	Dockerfile for the ps3dev toolchain image
fallout1-ce/	Engine source: upstream plus PS3 platform support (vendored)
SDL2_PSL1GHT/	SDL2 port: upstream plus renderer fixes (vendored)
patches/	Diffs of both vendored trees against upstream, with base commits
pkg/	Package build: Makefile and icon

Implementation notes

• Toolchain. The port builds against the ps3aqua fork set: ps3toolchain (GCC 7.5 with a PS3-patched newlib), the PSL1GHT SDK and SDL2_PSL1GHT. These three are patched against each other; mixing them with the upstream ps3dev components does not compile. The Dockerfile assembles all of it in one image.
• Big endian. The Cell is big-endian while every binary format the game ships is little-endian. Endian-safe accessors were added for DAT payloads, .fon and .aaf fonts, the MVE bitstream and audio sample seeds.
• Fixes worth upstreaming. getOffset() in movie_lib.cc truncated motion offsets to uint8_t, which corrupts blocks during MVE playback on any platform. See patches/README.md for this and other platform-independent corrections.
• SDL2 renderer. Viewport and clip handling was fixed for the SDL 2.30 API, along with colour and coordinate propagation through the render command queue. Behaviour on little-endian platforms is unchanged.
• PSL1GHT constraints. There is no OpenGL (the SDL window is created without the GL flag), and hardware surface copies do not alpha-blend. Overlay-style drawing therefore has to be composed on a CPU-side surface and uploaded in one transfer.
• Path resolution. The engine resolves filename case by scanning directories on every open. On PS3 that scan starts inside the data directory instead of the filesystem root, and results are cached, which cuts filesystem syscalls by more than half.

Troubleshooting

• RPCS3 memory usage keeps climbing. Lower the emulator's log level (Log → Fatal/Success); verbose sys_fs logging is expensive over long sessions.
• The game starts and exits immediately. The game data is not in the directory listed above. Under RPCS3, TTY.log shows the engine's startup steps and where it stopped.
• cannot execute: required file not found while building on Windows. Git's line-ending conversion has mangled shell scripts. This repository disables it via .gitattributes; on an older clone, run git config core.autocrlf false and check the tree out again.

Credits

• alexbatalov/fallout1-ce — the engine
• ps3aqua — SDL2_PSL1GHT, PSL1GHT and toolchain forks
• The ps3dev community — the PSL1GHT ecosystem
• RPCS3 — invaluable during development

Legal

This repository contains and distributes no copyrighted Fallout assets. Fallout is a trademark of Bethesda Softworks. You need a legal copy of the game to play. The engine source is subject to the same license terms as upstream fallout1-ce (see fallout1-ce/LICENSE.md).