NeverCookFirst/DimensionsRecomp

A native PC build of LEGO Dimensions, made by statically recompiling the Xbox 360 release.

Download  ·  How to make mods  ·  Build it yourself  ·  LEGO Dimensions Discord

I started this to answer one question: can a toys-to-life game be recompiled, and is a native PC port of LEGO Dimensions actually realistic?

The answer is yes, and this is the proof. It boots, plays, saves, loads DLC, and talks to a Toy Pad, as a normal Windows program.

This is not a claim to be the one correct way to play on PC. Emulation works, and the emulator projects did the groundwork that made this possible. If xenia, RPCS3, Cemu or shadPS4 serves you better, use them. I respect every project around this game and none of them are competitors.

There is a second reason, and it matters to me more than the first one. I want this to make someone else want to build something. If it gets one person curious enough to open a disassembler for the first time, it has already paid for itself.

So, to be blunt about what this is not: it is not a claim on the idea. Nobody's LEGO Dimensions port is blocked because this one exists. If a team gets together tomorrow and writes a better one from scratch, without using a single byte of what is here, that is exactly the outcome I was after and I will say so happily. Take the idea, ignore the code, do it properly.

And whatever you end up building — respect what other people are working on.

I would rather you hear this from me than guess.

What it did not do is decide what to build or judge whether the result was any good. The goal and the scope were mine. The domain knowledge about this game, its Toy Pad, its saves and its archives came from years of community work, not from a model. And above all I played the game. Every "this is broken", "this feels off" and "this is finally right" came from a person in front of the actual thing. A model cannot tell you a world failed to load or a cutscene hung. That loop is what turned something that compiled into something that plays.

If you are skeptical about AI being used this way, that is fair and I will not argue with you. Judge it by whether it works.

No game data is included here. You bring your own, and the installer checks that it is the right one before it does anything.

Have ready:

• The Xbox 360 disc, dumped and extracted. Dump your disc to an ISO, then extract that ISO to a folder with a tool like extract-xiso or Xbox Image Browser. The installer wants the folder, not the ISO. It is right when the folder contains Default.xex alongside GAME.DAT and GAME.HDR. Only the original release works, and the installer will tell you if yours is a different build.

• Title Update 23. Not 24, not 22. The recomp was built from the TU23 executable and will not run on anything else, so this one is checked by hash and a wrong update is refused. Give it either the raw package file, which is named tu00000003_00000000 and has no extension, or a folder holding Default.xexp, PATCH.DAT and PATCH.HDR.

• DLC, optional. Point the installer at a folder holding your DLC packages and it takes all of them at once. Bought a pack later? Run the installer again and pick "Add DLC to an install I already have" on the first screen - it asks only for the packages and the folder you installed into, writes nothing else, and leaves your saves, settings and mods alone.

Then just run DimensionsRecompiled-Setup.exe and follow the wizard. It writes a README.txt next to the game with the hotkeys, settings and save locations.

Updates are handled in game. Turn them off with F4 → Online → Check for updates at start.

Out of the box the installer sets up the LEGO Toypad app, which stands in for the portal and lets you pick figures with a controller.

Your real Toy Pad works too - the Wii U, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One pads are all supported. Windows will not let the game reach the pad on its own, so swap the driver once with Zadig: tick Options, List All Devices, pick your pad and check its USB ID before you change anything:

Choose libusb-win32 and press Install Driver (on a pad Windows already has a driver for the button reads Replace Driver - same step). Then in game press F4, open Toy Pad, untick Emulated Toy Pad and restart. The pad lights up and real figures work.

To hand the pad back to Windows later, uninstall that driver in Device Manager.

The game can also start and stop the companion app for you: F4 → Toy Pad → Open the Toy Pad app with the game. It launches with the game and closes with it, and an app you started yourself is left alone.

Any XInput pad works, and so does the keyboard, with no setting to find first:

BACK sat on Backspace until 0.1.13 and kept firing by accident; it moved to =, and anyone who had rebound it keeps their own binding.

Every bind is editable in F4 under Keyboard bindings, with Rebind, Reset and Clear on each line. Keyboard and pad are live at the same time. Mouse look exists but is off by default: Controls → Mouse moves the camera.

F4 opens the settings. Since 0.1.17 they are arranged for people rather than for the code: Display, Performance, Graphics, Audio, Controls, Keyboard bindings, Shortcuts, Toy Pad, Mods and fixes, Online. Hover a line for what it does; an orange label means it takes effect after a restart. Everything technical is still there under Advanced, by its raw name - that is what a bug report may ask you to change.

Performance holds what actually costs frame rate: Resolution scale, the Output resolution cap, Anisotropic filtering and Depth of field blur. The last one is new: the game has no switch of its own, so the recomp drops that render pass entirely when it is off - a sharper picture and a little less GPU work.

Del opens a memory scanner built into the game - the same idea as Cheat Engine, without needing Cheat Engine.

Pick a value type, type the number you can see on screen, First scan, then change it in game and Next scan = until a few addresses are left. Click one and Write once or Freeze it. If the number is not shown anywhere, start from Unknown value and narrow down with Increased / Decreased / Changed / Unchanged. Scans run on their own thread, so the game keeps moving while they work, and candidates are held as a bitmap rather than a capped list, so an unknown-value hunt actually converges.

Save as cheat stores an address under a name in cheats_5752084B.txt beside the game and re-applies it on every launch, only while its tick box is on.

Cheat Engine itself still works, and docs/cheat-engine.md explains the two things that otherwise make it look broken: guest memory is a file mapping, so MEM_MAPPED scanning has to be switched on, and every value is big-endian. Ready-made big-endian types for it are in tools/cheatengine. The console command membase prints where guest memory landed for the current run and converts addresses either way.

The game ships its official translations, and the recomp picks one the way the console did, with a language ID. Set user_language in legodimensions.toml while the game is closed, or find it in F4 under Advanced / Kernel:

user_language = 4   # French

Some translations share a language ID and are told apart by the country instead, so user_country picks between them. Both Spanish translations sit on one ID, and French may behave the same way.

user_language = 5    # Spanish
user_country  = 71   # ... as spoken in Mexico

Known issues:

• Random freeze in some levels (seen most in the LEGO Movie world): the picture stops, the music keeps playing. Two game threads end up waiting on each other. Being worked on; if it happens to you, attach the hang-*.dmp the game writes next to the exe to your issue.
• Stutter when a level or cutscene loads, settling after about half a minute. It comes from how GPU data is synced back during those scenes. A faster way exists but broke geometry on AMD cards, so it is off for now.
• Mods can break abilities. With several characters out at once, some mods have stopped characters from using gadgets and ranged attacks. Turn mods off in F8 before reporting gameplay bugs.
• Starting a new save and quitting before the opening cutscenes finish can leave a save that will not load. Play until you are walking around first.
• 60 FPS is an unlock the original never ran at, and most remaining bugs live there. Set Performance → Frame rate target to 30 in F4 before reporting anything odd.
• Some scenes render with wrong colours or missing effects (darker lighting in parts of the Simpsons and Ghostbusters worlds, for one).
• Lag with AMD FSR 1 or CAS selected. On weaker GPUs the upscaling filter itself can cost frames. If the game stutters, set F4 → Graphics → Upscaling filter to Bilinear (fastest).
• Windows on ARM (Snapdragon laptops, Surface Pro 11) is not supported: the game starts but shows a black screen.
• Screen tearing. The vsync setting never controlled it - despite the name, it only paces the emulated console - so it is now locked off and greyed out of F4 rather than left there to be tried. Stopping the tearing properly needs deeper changes to how finished frames reach the screen; until then, your driver's own vertical sync or a frame limiter is the workaround.
• The Vulkan backend is a work in progress. Direct3D 12 is the working one and stays the default. See below if you want to try Vulkan anyway.
• Not every code path has been visited, so an unexplored corner can still hit a hard stop rather than a graphical glitch.

Set gpu_backend to vulkan in legodimensions.toml next to the game.

What was wrong: a texture-fetch path multiplied 16-bit samples by 65535 and blew entire worlds out to flat white with the HUD still drawn on top. That branch is now switched off, so colours come out correct - but darker than intended, because the scaling it was meant to do is simply not happening yet. Making it correct rather than absent is the actual fix, and it is not in this release.

Put plainly: Vulkan went from unusable to look at it and see. That is all.

Roughly in the order I want to get to it. No dates.

• GPU recompilation - in progress now. Graphics is the one part still done the emulator way: the game's draw calls are translated while it runs. A native Direct3D 12 renderer is being built that does to them what was already done to the CPU code - shaders translated ahead of time, and the game's draw calls going straight to the PC GPU instead of through an emulated Xbox 360 one. That is where the remaining performance and most of the visual bugs are. It already draws frames in development builds, but it is not in releases yet and there is no date. Until it lands, bug fixes keep shipping on the current renderer.
• Fixing the crashes that keep coming back. A handful of them are reproducible and hit a lot of people, so they matter more than anything new.
• Real Toy Pad auto-detect. Plug a real portal in and the game finds it and switches over by itself, without changing settings by hand.
• Settings inside the game. The game's own options menu gets the port's settings (graphics, frame rate, Toy Pad, updates), so F4 is no longer the only way in.
• Switching language while playing, without a restart.
• A launcher before the first start, like the PC ports of Sony games: pick resolution, graphics quality, controller and language, check the game files, then play.
• UI fixes, and layouts for other gamepads. Right now the button prompts assume an Xbox pad. PlayStation, Switch and generic controllers should show their own.
• Updating the Discord Rich Presence so it shows more than a static line.

There is no emulator running underneath, and that is the point.

The Xbox 360 executable is PowerPC code. A tool translates it to C++ once, ahead of time, and a normal compiler turns that into a native x86-64 Windows program. Your CPU runs real x86 instructions. Nothing is interpreted at runtime.

What could not simply be translated is everything the game asked the console for:

The runtime providing all of that is the ReXGlue SDK, which derives from xenia. So: the CPU side is a port, the graphics side still stands on emulator research. Saying that plainly is more useful than overselling it.

The SDK needed changes to run this game, and they are not in this repository. They are in a fork — NeverCookFirst/rexglue-sdk, branch toypad-ui — along with the Toy Pad work, the input handling and several crash fixes. Every release is built from that branch, so that is the SDK to use if you want to reproduce one.

Because there is no interpreter tax, it can run at 60 FPS and use modern upscaling (FSR 1 and CAS) and higher internal resolutions.

Everything was developed and tested on one machine: Ryzen 7 5700X3D, RTX 4060, 32 GB RAM, Windows 11, 1080p. A mid range desktop, not a high end one.

That is the only machine this has been properly tested on, so I cannot promise stable performance on any device, including that one. This is a public beta.

As for now, game is playable on Steam Deck through Proton, native port is not coming soon.

Open an issue. The template asks for the few things that actually help: game.log, your frame rate target, and your GPU. Since 0.1.17 a crash writes which function it died in and who called it into the log, so the log alone is usually enough.

• Unleashed Recompiled, first and above all. This project exists because of how much I loved what they did. Seeing a console game turned into a real native PC build is what made me ask whether LEGO Dimensions could be next.
• ReXGlue, right after them. It is the toolkit that does the actual recompiling and provides the runtime this game sits on. Without it there would have been nothing to try in the first place.
• The LEGO Dimensions Discord, for years of accumulated knowledge about this game and for encouraging every one of these experiments instead of dismissing them.
• harrysof, for the LEGO Toypad app and the Toy Pad protocol work everything portal related here builds on.
• xenia, whose research into the Xbox 360 GPU makes the graphics side possible at all.
• connorh315, for BrickVault and for answering a pile of format questions in detail. The DFLT decompressor that lets our tools read the game's compressed archives is his work, used with his permission, and his notes on the PS4 build settled in one afternoon a question we had been circling for weeks.
• Everyone who tested a broken build or said it was a good idea before it obviously was one.

The installer is one big unsigned executable that unpacks a payload into your game folder, which is exactly the shape heuristic scanners and SmartScreen do not like. It comes back clean: VirusTotal scan.

Windows will still put up "Windows protected your PC" the first time you run it. That is normal for anything unsigned. Click More info, then Run anyway.

The code here is MIT licensed, see LICENSE. That covers what I wrote. It does not cover LEGO Dimensions or any of its data. Bring your own game.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by LEGO, TT Games or Warner Bros.

There are no donations. Nothing here is sold, and nobody should be asking you for money for it.

Built by NeverCookFirst, logo by c0mpadre.