Sonic fans, get ready for a treat. A team of programmers and modders has released an unofficial PC port of the Xbox 360 Sonic game, Sonic Unleashed. This unofficial PC port is available for download right now.
Titled Unleashed Recompiled, this unofficial PC port was created through the process of static recompilation. The port offers both Windows and Linux support. Moreover, it comes with numerous built-in enhancements such as high resolutions, ultrawide support, high frame rates, and improved performance.
For those wondering, SEGA won’t take down this project. Unleashed Recompiled does not feature any game assets. In other words, it’s similar to the unofficial PC ports of Super Mario 64, Crash Team Racing, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Perfect Dark, and Jak & Daxter.
The team claims that it has taken special care to recreate the game’s visuals as accurately as possible. The colors are as vibrant as those of the PlayStation 3 version, which did not use the color correction filter present in the Xbox 360 version. This was how the game was originally meant to look like. However, there’s also an option to recreate the original warm filter from the Xbox 360 version.
This unofficial PC port of Sonic Unleashed also comes with some visual enhancements. For instance, it supports resolutions up to 4K and MSAA levels beyond the 2X. It also has support for “Alpha to Coverage” Anti-Aliasing to enhance the visual result of transparent textures with hard edges. Plus, you can expect higher quality DoF (Depth of Field) and an enhanced Motion Blur option.
And that’s not all. The team has written a new renderer from scratch to translate the game’s draw calls to modern APIs in a highly efficient way while also taking advantage of multi-threading.
Modern rendering techniques such as bindless textures and shader specialization are also used to maximize the performance on systems with modern hardware whilst also supporting a wide range of lower end hardware. Moreover, the new renderer brings multiple optimizations to the game’s shadow map rendering. Plus, there are special techniques to automatically detect and skip unnecessary texture copies that are no longer needed in modern APIs.
For those wondering, yes. This unofficial PC port supports uncapped framerates. Do note, though, that you might encounter some issues with an unlocked framerate. Thankfully, at 60FPS, the game works like a charm.
You can go ahead and download Unleashed Recompiled from this link. As said, you’ll need an official copy of the X360 version. So, make sure to read its installation instructions.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Amazing work !
Great, the reverse engineering tools used to decompile the game are also capable to decompile other Xbox 360 games which excellent news.
Xenia emulator development is as sleepy as it is, maybe decompilation is the way to go for Xbox 360 games
I've been waiting to play all of these games on Xenia since 2018:
Army of Two (has X360 exclusive pre-order DLCs that the PS3 version is missing)
Battlefield 2 Modern Combat
Burnout Revenge (has X360 exclusive car)
Crackdown 1
Crackdown 2
Chromehounds
Far Cry Instincts Predator
Full Auto
Gears of War 2
Gears of War 3
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 (different from the Xbox/PS2/PC versions)
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (has X360 exclusive DLC that the PS3 version is missing and is different from the PC version)
Hydro Thunder Hurricane
Just Cause 1 (X360 version is next gen unlike the Xbox/PS2/PC versions)
Ninja Gaiden 2 (now we have the Ninja Gaiden 2 Black remake)
Perfect Dark Zero
Tenchu Z
7 years later in 2025 and literally none of these games are even "playable" yet (Xenia doesn't even have a "perfect" status because of how low their standards are)………………………………………………….
Worse still, almost all of the emulator settings such as changing the resolution are in a text file and not even in the emulator's UI. This emulator really won't finish development even in 2125.
You have xenia manager front end that you don need to edit the files.
Alright, so I just downloaded Xenia Manager after hearing about it from your comment, why are the "patches" (unlock FPS, etc) not working for any game, like Gears of War Judgement or others?
EDIT: Nevermind, turns out that when installing a patch, I just had to select a game's respective ".patch.toml" and not like (TU0).patch.toml. TU0 in this context refers to "Title Update" and the 0 refers to the update's number, such as 2, 5, etc. so some would read like this:
(TU2).patch.toml
And for those reading this, hope you find this info useful.
Ninja Gaiden 2 "Black" is just a slightly less sh*t Sigma with less content.
The original 360 version is still thr best way to play the game.
really gears 2 is not playable?
It is playble and at 4k xenia canary with xenia manager.
At 4K it is extremely GPU demanding, and the upscaling breaks every post process effect possible so you need to disable them in the patch file of the game making the image super flat.
But it's playable at 720p with only one vital option in the patch to fix the black shading bug, you'll get great framerate and you can compensate for the 720p image with the included FSR, not perfect, but very playable
You can add these, still unplayable or need to sacrifice quality for a playable state like COD 3 where you need to completely disable the grass, the upscaler is also trash, when it doesn't break effects it flickers like hell, it only works on a tiny portion of the games.
– Kameo
– Gears of War Judgement
– Tomb Raider Legend (the PC version has broken next-gen effects)
– Tomb Raider Underworld (the 360 has 2 exclusive DLCs)
– Gun (the 360 has the best version)
– Splinter Cell Double Agent (also the best version)
– Call of Duty 3 (way better version than PS3)
No love for Dantes inferno, Incredible hulk & condemned 2 ? That's sad as these games are so fun. I'd love unofficial ports of these anyday
Dante's Inferno is playable on both RPCS3 and Xenia with very minor issues, his list includes games that aren't fully playable yet
No worries, I'm already aware about these games, and I already have these games downloaded on RPCS3 even before 2020 (Condemned 2 in particular is the one that I've been waiting to be compatible the most out of these).
It's just that I mentioned X360 exclusives while the mentioned multiplatform games have exclusive or different content for their X360 versions.
it runs great on xenia but, I'd love it if lost odyssey got one too.
ninja gaiden sigma 1 through 3 already have pc ports from koei tecmo.
Yeah, I’m aware, it’s just that I prefer having all versions since the Sigma versions differ a lot and since I’m a preservationist.
AT LEAST gears of war 2 and 3 should be playable. Idk why microsoft doesn't remake or remaster those games for pc, instead they keep funding games like Avowed. They seem to be allergic to have a good game launch
This is incredible. Man I love unofficial ports. There's an RE outbreak port in works too. I hope every console exclusive that never had a pc port will make it unofficially there someday
Ace combat 6 would be nice, emulating it on xenia is not great
can i look around with the mouse?
Wait wasn't this game officially released for PC as well ?
I believe Generations was the first Sonic HD title to come to PC.
Unleashed was during the late 2000s when Microsoft completely f*ked the PC platform and every developer was b*ching about piracy.
Misleading article in my opinion. You have to have a 360 and a 360 with some special cable etc. This setup is not easy and impossible for many fo us.
uploading at the moment video and ask for link will be up tomorrow just visit grangler arcade youtube tomorrow.
You only need a 360 etc… if you want to do it the completely legal way. Just download the game. It's complete with all DLC on archive.org
Nah they just say all that to avoid Sega hitting them with a takedown request. It actually works with the .iso you can find easily online. You'll also need to find a title update and the DLC files but I found em all with a few minutes of googling and lookiing on some reddit posts. Mods even work with this decomplied version and seems to play perfectly at 120 fps at 8k on my 13700k/4080 PC.
Fingers cross we start to get good games from that era hostage in the 360.
I hate Sonic fans for being degenerate furries, but i have to kudos their passion towards the games.
Really hope someone figures out how to do this with lost odyssey.
Even if you reverse engineer the game, you aren't immune to copyright violations. You roll out a game that’s a dead ringer for theirs; you really think they won’t drag you to court and shut your whole project down?