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Burnout Dominator Reversed

Burnout Dominator (PS2) recompiled into a native PC game.

<img src="docs/screenshots/banner.jpg" width="100%" alt="Boosting down a mountain road at 148 mph"> </div>

The whole game runs natively on PC, from the intro videos to the last World Tour event: races, crashes, Burning Laps, the memory card, sound, gamepads, at full speed and up to four times the PS2's resolution.

No game data is included. You need your own European disc image (SLES-54627); the installer checks it.

Screenshots

<table> <tr> <td width="50%"><img src="docs/screenshots/race-mountain.jpg" alt="Mountain road"></td> <td width="50%"><img src="docs/screenshots/race-factory-sun.jpg" alt="Industrial track in the sun"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/screenshots/race-city-boost.jpg" alt="Boosting through the city"></td> <td><img src="docs/screenshots/crash.jpg" alt="Crash with Impact Time"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/screenshots/car-select.jpg" alt="Car select"></td> <td><img src="docs/screenshots/medal-table.jpg" alt="Burnout Challenge medal table"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/screenshots/settings-menu.jpg" alt="The F1 settings menu"></td> <td><img src="docs/screenshots/settings-controls.jpg" alt="The F1 keyboard and mouse controls"></td> </tr> </table>

_{Captured in the game at 4x resolution (2560 pixels wide) with 16 samples per pixel: <b>F1</b> → resolution 4x. Last row: the F1 menu over a paused race.}

Status

Playable from start to finish, and stable. Work now goes into speed and modding.

✅ Game	boot, intro videos, menus, World Tour, car select, events, results
✅ Races	cars, traffic, damage, crashes and Impact Time, reflections, HUD
✅ Saves	memory card (your profile is saved after every event), save states on F5 / F7
✅ Controls	Xbox, PlayStation and SDL pads with vibration, keyboard and mouse
✅ Graphics	up to 4x resolution, supersampling, FXAA, 16:9
✅ Sound	music, engines, crashes, menus, the races' reverb
✅ Speed	60 frames per second in six-car races; the race keeps its speed when frames come late
✅ High frame rate	120, 144, 240... frames per second (refresh_rate): the simulation runs that fast, not interpolated (on a Ryzen + RTX 5090 a race draws every frame up to 240 and 297 to 331 frames a second at 300 to 500, at full speed; 144 also at 4x resolution with 16 samples a pixel)

Install (Windows)

You need your European Burnout Dominator ISO (keep it where it is: the game reads it at every launch), a Vulkan graphics card, 20 GB free, and Visual Studio 2026 or 2022 Community with Desktop development with C++. Its optional component C++ Clang Compiler for Windows makes the PS2's graphics programs run about 5% faster: the build uses it when it is installed.

winget install Python.Python.3.12 Git.Git Microsoft.PowerShell
git clone https://github.com/literalynn/BurnoutDominatorReversed.git

Drop your ISO onto Installer.bat in the cloned folder (30 to 90 minutes the first time), then play with Play.bat.

To update: git pull, then Installer.bat again.

<details> <summary><b>Linux</b></summary>

sudo apt install git python3 cmake ninja-build g++ pkg-config libgl-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev \
  libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libasound2-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswresample-dev libswscale-dev
git clone https://github.com/literalynn/BurnoutDominatorReversed.git && cd BurnoutDominatorReversed
python3 tools/install.py --iso "/path/to/Burnout Dominator.iso"
python3 tools/project.py run

macOS is not verified yet.

</details>

System requirements. Single-core CPU speed matters most: the game and the PS2's graphics programs each run on one thread. On a Ryzen 7 9800X3D a six-car race takes about 5.6 ms of a 16.7 ms frame on the busier thread; four CPU threads are enough. The GPU needs Vulkan: the PS2 resolution is light, 2x and 4x need a dedicated card.

Controls

PS2	Keyboard and mouse	Gamepad
✕ accelerate, select	W · left click	A / ✕
□ brake	Space	X / □
R1 boost, Impact Time	Left Ctrl	RB / R1
D-pad: steer, menus	A · D · S, arrows, mouse wheel	D-pad, left stick
△ back	V · Escape · right click	Y / △
○	C · keypad 1	B / ○
L1 · L2 · R2	Left Shift · E · Q	LB · LT · RT
Start · Select	Enter · Tab	Start · Back

Every key can be changed in F1 → Keyboard and mouse controls: up to three keys, mouse buttons or wheel directions per PS2 button.

Key
F1	settings menu (the game pauses): volume, resolution, anti-aliasing, aspect, controls...
F11 · Alt+Enter	full screen
F5 · F7	save · load state
Escape	back; in a race, asks whether to quit
F9	mark a glitch: notes the moment in the log, saves a screenshot and a save state in marks/

<details> <summary><b>Settings</b> (<code>settings.ini</code> next to <code>Play.bat</code>, also changed by F1)</summary>

Setting	Default
window_width, window_height	1280 × 960	start-up window size
fullscreen	false	borderless full screen
vsync, fps_limit	true, 0	display sync and cap
aspect	4:3	4:3, 16:9 (with in-game widescreen) or stretch
smooth_scaling	true	bilinear enlargement
super_sampling	4	samples per pixel: 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16
high_resolution	true	a higher resolution built from the samples: 2x (1280 pixels wide) with 4 or 8 samples, 4x (2560) with 16
fxaa	false	FXAA on the finished picture
hud_smoothing	true	the race HUD smooth instead of blocky at 2x and 4x
progressive_scan	true	whole frames, no interlacing lines
fast_loading	true	loading screens run faster than real time
keep_speed	true	when the graphics cannot keep up, the game runs more simulation steps per drawn frame instead of slowing down (from the next race)
stick_deadzone	12	percent
vibration	true	the game's pad vibration on your gamepad
gamepad_mappings	—	extra gamecontrollerdb.txt
volume	100	percent
show_fps	false	frames per second in the corner
key_cross, key_l1...	see Controls	up to three keys, mouse buttons or wheel directions (MOUSE_LEFT, MOUSE_WHEEL_UP...) per button, or NONE
refresh_rate	60	the game runs at 60 or 50 Hz without asking; 120, 144, 240... up to 500 runs the whole game that many frames a second at the same speed (more CPU work: a PC that cannot keep up draws fewer frames, then slows the race down), from the next menu page

</details>

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How it works

From a disc to a PC game

The PS2 runs Burnout Dominator on several processors at once. This project rebuilds each of them on the PC:

PS2	Here
EE, the main MIPS R5900 CPU running the game's code	translated ahead of time into C++ by PS2Recomp: 51,161 generated files, compiled into the executable
VU0 and VU1, the vector units that transform and light every vertex	their microprograms are compiled ahead of time into C++ as well (tools/compile_vu_programs.py), cycle-accurate, with an interpreter for the rest
GS, the graphics chip	paraLLEl-GS on the GPU through Vulkan, which also renders at higher resolutions
IOP, the I/O processor with its sound, disc and pad modules	emulated, running the game's own IRX modules
SPU2, IPU, DMA, timers	emulated: sound voices and mixing, the MPEG video decoder

Nothing in the game is skipped or faked: SDK functions are replaced by native code only where their identity is proven (docs/SDK_FUNCTIONS.md). The game runs on three host threads: the game code with the IOP, the VU1 programs with VIF1 and the GIF, and the GS submission to the GPU.

The road to playable

The first builds stopped before the menus. Once the game got further, its first race drew one frame per second with corrupted textures, and the race clock never moved. Some of the bugs that stood between that and a playable game:

• PABSW read the wrong register, so the track streamer loaded the wrong sections and drew meshes with the wrong microcode.
• SQRT.S read the wrong operand: every square root in the game was wrong, car bodies were squashed flat and the chase camera sat at bumper height.
• CVT.W.S rounded instead of truncating, and the boost gauge loop never ended.
• PATH3 texture uploads were released at the wrong moment around MSKPATH3 windows, and DMA chains were cut at 4,096 tags: wrong textures, every other frame at speed.
• MR32 stalled on lanes it does not read, which gave one vertex in four a wrong reflection: the car paint looked like camouflage.
• The game thread must round floats toward zero like the EE: the camera jumped whenever the car's heading crossed 180 degrees.
• 64-bit reads of the scratchpad at 0x70002000 returned the IPU's registers instead, which corrupted the city tracks' object lists and made the scenery flash.
• The frame governor reads the CPU's Count register, which never moved: a slow frame meant a slow race. keep_speed now lets the game catch up.

Each fix is described in docs/CHANGES.md and the investigations in docs/FINDINGS.md.

Speed

A race went from 1 frame per second (GS on the CPU) to 16 with paraLLEl-GS, then to 60: compiled VU0 and VU1 programs, VU1 and GS work moved to their own threads, a declared idle loop, and a long list of smaller fixes. On October 19 a replay of 1,500 frames of a six-car race went from 12.7 to 8.9 s of wall time, with the same picture bit for bit. BDR_STOP_AT_VSYNC measures a build's CPU time on such a replay (docs/BOOT.md).

Since November 5, 2026 the ten heaviest VU1 microprograms (world, cars, props, sky, sparks, trails) run as C++ that the build translates from the game's own microcode, with the same output, compared over 9.5 million starts: at 300 Hz a race went from 171 to 228 frames a second on average, and to 297 once each VBlank got a console frame's EE cycles. The game thread's VU0 microprograms followed the same night. PS2_VU_NATIVE=0 runs the microcode instead (docs/NATIVE_RENDERER.md). They run on Windows and Linux with an x86-64 processor that has FMA3 (Intel since 2013, AMD since 2012); elsewhere the microcode runs.

Documentation

STATUS	what works and what is left, with the full history
DEVELOPMENT	build steps, run options, tests, repository layout
BOOT	boot sequence, IOP modules, diagnostics
CHANGES	every change to the PS2Recomp snapshot
SDK_FUNCTIONS · FINDINGS	reverse-engineering evidence

Help wanted

Contributions are welcome, from code to bug reports:

• Speed for smaller PCs: with the VU programs translated, a race's CPU time goes to the game thread (the compiled EE code, the IOP interpreter, the SPU2) and to paraLLEl-GS's submission thread (docs/NATIVE_RENDERER.md).
• Modding: disc_patches.cpp changes disc files as the game reads them, without touching the ISO.
• Sound: the SPU2 (iop_spu2.cpp) needs testing by ear, its reverb especially.
• Linux and macOS: builds, controllers, packaging.
• Bug reports: what you saw, when, your hardware, and if you can a save state (F5) taken just before.

Read CONTRIBUTING.md first: no faked success, evidence for every SDK binding, every upstream change documented.

Credits and license

Built on PS2Recomp by ran-j and contributors (GPLv3, like this project), with paraLLEl-GS by Arntzen Software (LGPLv3). Game files and the code derived from them are never committed and stay on your machine.

Burnout Dominator is a trademark of Electronic Arts. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts, Criterion Games or Sony Interactive Entertainment. Screenshots are of the game running in this project.