Banjo-Tooie (XBLA) → PC / Steam Deck

A native port of Banjo-Tooie, using the Xbox 360 XBLA re-release as the source, built by statically recompiling its guest PowerPC code to C++ against ReXGlue (a Xenia-derived Xbox 360 static-recompilation SDK). The result is a real Windows/Linux executable — no emulator running at runtime, and no N64 ROM involved anywhere in the pipeline.

Status

Playable end to end. Boots from the title screen through the main menu, save select, the full intro cutscene, and into free-roaming, player-controlled gameplay — confirmed on both Windows (NVIDIA GPU) and a real Steam Deck (RADV hardware Vulkan, including Steam's Gaming Mode). Controller, keyboard/mouse, save/load, and the Windows/Linux launcher have all been used successfully by an actual player, not just booted for a smoke test.

Known rough edges: a handful of the game's ~22,000 recompiled functions were missed by the initial static analysis (the fix is always the same pattern — see the crash write-ups in the SDK submodule's commit history if you hit one), full-game longevity beyond the opening areas is still lightly tested, and audio output quality has not been verified by ear.

You need your own copy of the game

This repository does not, and will not, include any of Banjo-Tooie's game data. No textures, no audio, no strings, no executable — none of it. To play, you supply your own legally-owned XBLA package (the .xex-containing STFS container you extract from your own Xbox 360 profile) and the launcher pulls the game data out of that. This mirrors how other static-recompilation ports (e.g. Zelda64Recomp) work: the tooling here is original, the game itself is not redistributed.

For players

Grab the single-file launcher for your OS (Banjo-Tooie.exe / Banjo-Tooie) and point it at your own XBLA package. Full instructions: launcher/README.md.

Repository layout

Path	What
banjotooie-recomp/	The recompiler's manifest (banjotooie_manifest.toml), function/switch-table overrides (overrides.toml), and the small host harness (CMake project) the recompiled code links into.
rexglue-sdk/	Git submodule — a fork of rexglue/rexglue-sdk with the bring-up fixes this port needed (audio-device fallback, keyboard/mouse input, a few kernel shims, a Linux window icon).
launcher/	The cross-platform (Windows/Linux) launcher: extracts a player's own XBLA package and runs the recompiled binary. See its own README.
steamdeck/	Scripts used to cross-build a glibc-portable Linux release targeting the Steam Deck from WSL.

Not checked in (see .gitignore): the game's own data files, banjotooie-recomp/generated/ (the ~3.4M lines of recompiled guest code — regenerable in about a minute via rexglue codegen against your own copy of the game's executable, so it's treated as a build artifact rather than source), and all build output.

Building from source

Requires CMake ≥ 3.25, Clang ≥ 20, and Ninja (Windows also needs the VS Build Tools' MSVC/Windows SDK; Linux additionally needs GTK3 + a Vulkan loader). With the toolchain in place:

git clone --recurse-submodules <this-repo-url>
cd banjo_tooie_xbla_recomp
. .\rexenv.ps1   # puts clang/cmake/ninja on PATH (Windows)
cd banjotooie-recomp
cmake --preset win-amd64-release -DREXSDK_DIR=../rexglue-sdk `
  "-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-march=x86-64-v3" "-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-march=x86-64-v3"
cmake --build --preset win-amd64-release --target banjotooie

This produces banjotooie.exe (+ rexruntime.dll), but it has no game data compiled in — it still needs --game_data_root <path-to-your-extracted-xbla-files> at launch, which is exactly what the launcher automates. For the Linux/Steam Deck cross-build path, see the scripts under steamdeck/.

Credits

Built on ReXGlue by Tom Clay, itself derived from the Xenia project. Banjo-Tooie is the property of Microsoft/Rare; nothing in this repository transfers any rights to their work.

The port was developed by @iron-jay with Claude (Anthropic) as a pair-programming collaborator across the project's sessions — crash triage on the recompiled guest code, the kernel/input/audio bring-up fixes carried in the rexglue-sdk fork, the launcher and its STFS extractor, and the Linux/Steam Deck build path. Hardware verification, testing, and direction throughout were the author's.