Burnout Revenge, Ace Combat 5 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles Get Unofficial PC Ports
by John Papadopoulos · DSOGamingIt appears that three console-exclusive titles have been unofficially ported to the PC. These are Burnout Revenge, Ace Combat 5, and Midnight Club: Los Angeles. So, let’s take a closer look at them.
Burnout Revenge and Midnight Club: Los Angeles are part of the Xbox 360 Native Ports initiative. These appear to be simple ports, without any major graphical improvements. They come with a Vulkan renderer, a native audio path, and a small GUI.
Since Burnout Revenge and Midnight Club: Los Angeles never came out on PC, some of you may be interested in them. From what I know, both of these games are playable with the Xenia Canary. So, it will be interesting to see some performance comparisons between them.
Regarding Burnout Revenge, another unofficial PC port is also in development, called FreeBurn.
FreeBurn is a decompilation of the PlayStation 2 version of Burnout Revenge. The goal is to create a high-quality PC port with many new features. The project has now surpassed the Xbox 360 version in some areas. It uses a modern renderer to load the game’s assets. It also adds ambient occlusion, dynamic lighting, and dynamic shadows. These new features also allow for a new time-of-day system.
There is currently no ETA for when FreeBurn will come out. Naturally, though, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.
Finally, we have the unofficial PC port of Ace Combat 5. As its creator has stated, the game’s main CPU code is not emulated. Instead, a Python tool reads the original game files and turns each function into C code ahead of time. GCC then compiles this code with a runtime that replaces the rest of the console.
This runtime handles the GS through Vulkan, the VU vector units, SPU2 audio, the IPU for movies, IOP modules, memory cards, and controllers. The end result is a normal ac5.exe file that runs on PC.
The graphics are also native. The 3D graphics, including aircraft, cockpits, terrain, objects, sky, and clouds, do not use an emulated Graphics Synthesizer. The game’s VU1 code for model transforms and lighting has been rewritten as native code. The geometry is then drawn as real GPU meshes. It uses vertex shaders, mipmapped textures, and anisotropic filtering. The flight HUD, radar, and radio captions are also rendered at your display’s resolution.
You can go ahead and download these unofficial PC ports from here, here, and here.
In case you are into projects like these, you can also download the unofficial PC ports of Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Crash Team Racing, and Duke Nukem: Zero Hour. You can also play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Perfect Dark, and Jak & Daxter.
Furthermore, Brian Tate has brought the three classic SNES Donkey Kong Country games to PC. For our SNES fans, we also have a PC port of Star Fox. And, since we’ve already gotten four SNES games, I’d really love to see a PC version of Jurassic Park with KB&M support and HD textures. Now that would be awesome.
And that’s not all of them. We also have the unofficial PC ports of Mario Party 4, Sonic Unleashed, GoldenEye 007, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Silent Hill, and Super Smash Bros 64. Last month, we shared the unofficial PC ports of Gears of War 2 and Syphon Filter. Earlier this month, we shared the PC ports of Diddy Kong Racing and Ace Combat 6. Let’s also not forget the unofficial PC versions of Wave Race 64, Blue Dragon, and Pikmin. Finally, you can download the PC ports of Ninja Gaiden 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Spider-Man: Edge of Time, Tekken 3, Mario Kart Wii, and Pokemon Crystal.
Have fun!
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.”
Contact: Email