A native port of Tony Hawk's Project 8 (Xbox 360, 2006), built by static recompilation. It is not an emulator: the game's PowerPC code is translated to C++ ahead of time and compiled into a normal executable for your machine.
You must own a copy of Tony Hawk's Project 8 for Xbox 360. This repository and every file in its releases contain no game assets, no disc image, and no copyrighted game content of any kind. The launcher reads a disc image you supply from your own copy, checks it is a supported release, and sets up an install on your machine. Nobody here has a copy to give you, and asking — in an issue, a discussion, or anywhere else — will get the thread closed.
A minute of Free Skate, running natively on Linux. In-game music is muted in the recording.
| Platform | Status |
|---|---|
| Linux x86_64 | Verified. The main development and testing platform. |
| macOS arm64 | Verified on Apple Silicon. Correct, but slow — see known issues. |
| Windows x86_64 | Experimental. Builds and runs, but never on real Windows. |
The Windows situation, plainly: everything is cross-compiled from Linux and tested under Wine, because nobody on this project owns a Windows machine. Under Wine the launcher works, a real disc is identified and extracted, and the game boots and renders. That is genuine progress and it is still not the same thing as running on Windows — Wine is a different implementation of the same interfaces, and the places it differs are where an untested port breaks.
If you try the Windows launcher, please tell us what happened. "It opened and the buttons worked" is as useful to us as a crash report, and there is a template for it.
- Your own copy of Tony Hawk's Project 8 for Xbox 360.
- A disc image of it (
.iso). You do not need to extract it — the launcher reads the image directly. - About 5 GB of free space.
- A GPU with Vulkan support.
- Download the release for your platform and unpack it anywhere you can write.
- Run the launcher —
thps_p8_gui(thps_p8_gui.exeon Windows). - It asks for your disc image. Point it at your
.iso. - It checks the image. This takes well under a second and copies nothing yet. A disc that is not the supported release is refused here, before 4.7 GB is written rather than after.
- On a match it copies the game data into the same folder — a few minutes, and you can stop it.
- The game starts. From then on the launcher is a Play button.
Everything lives in that one folder: the game data, your saves, your settings. Move it, copy it between your own machines, delete it — nothing is written anywhere else on your system.
macOS: the app is not notarized, so Gatekeeper will refuse a double-click. Right-click → Open → Open, once per install.
Windows: the binary is not signed, so SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC". More info → Run anyway.
More detail, including the accepted disc hash and where things live: docs/SETUP.md.
The one worth knowing before you play: leave the frame rate cap on. It is the default. With it off, in-level cutscenes run three to five times too fast.
Full list, including what is implemented but unverified: docs/KNOWN_ISSUES.md.
Is this an emulator?
No. An emulator interprets or JIT-compiles the console's instructions while you play. This translates them to C++ once, ahead of time, and compiles a native binary. The result runs as a normal application on your CPU.
Why isn't the game included?
Because it is not ours to give you. The release carries the runtime; your disc carries roughly 4.7 GB of content that will never be distributed here. A runtime without a copy of the game has nothing to run.
The launcher rejected my disc image. Why?
It hashes default.xex inside the image and compares it against the releases
this port was built from. Today that is one: the 2006 retail disc, listed in
docs/SETUP.md. It will tell you which of three things went
wrong — not a disc image, a different game, or the right game from a different
release.
If you own a PAL or NTSC-J disc, the hash and size of its default.xex are
genuinely useful to us — those two values are all it takes to add support for a
release. Do not send the file itself.
The tool that does the checking will print them for you. From the folder you unpacked:
# Linux / macOS
./thps_p8_identify --identify_disc=/path/to/your.iso --json# Windows
.\thps_p8_identify.exe --identify_disc="D:\path\to\your.iso" --jsonIt prints something like:
default.xex sha256: 1a2b3c...
default.xex size: 8237056 bytes
Paste those two lines into an issue, along with the region printed on your disc.
Where are my saves?
In saves/, inside the folder you unpacked. The launcher has a button for it.
Can I get more than 60 fps?
Yes, by turning the cap off in the launcher's Display settings — but read the known issues first, because in-level cutscenes break when you do.
My antivirus flagged it.
A false positive. Statically recompiled game binaries pattern-match packer and injector heuristics, and this happens to every project of this kind. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is written outside the install folder. Tell us which engine so we can track it.
Most people do not need to. If you want to: the launcher builds in about a
minute from nothing but a compiler and SDL3, and the game needs your own copy
because the recompiler reads default.xex as its input.
Ownership. You must own a copy of Tony Hawk's Project 8 for Xbox 360. This repository and every file in its releases contain no game assets, no disc image, and no copyrighted game content of any kind.
Non-affiliation. Tony Hawk's Project 8 is a trademark of Activision Publishing, Inc. Tony Hawk is a trademark of Tony Hawk. Xbox 360 and related marks are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. This is an independent, non-commercial preservation project. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Activision, Neversoft, Tony Hawk, Microsoft, or any other rights holder. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
What the licence covers. The source in this repository — the launcher, the disc identity worker, the supervisor, the game's host code, the recompiler configuration, the build scripts and the documentation — is under the BSD 3-Clause License (LICENSE). Third-party components are used under their own licences, reproduced in full in NOTICE.
It does not cover anything derived from the game. The code the recompiler
generates on your machine from your own default.xex is derived from
Activision and Neversoft's copyrighted binary, and this licence grants you no
rights to it. Run it locally against the copy you own; do not redistribute it,
and do not redistribute your game files.
Do not request or share game files. Issues, discussions and pull requests asking where to obtain the game will be closed without an answer. Pull requests containing game assets, decrypted intermediates, platform keys or generated translation units will be rejected — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
- ReXGlue by Tom Clay — the static recompilation runtime this is built on.
- Xenia — the Xbox 360 emulation work ReXGlue derives from. None of this exists without it.
- XenonRecomp and rexdex's recompiler — for pioneering this approach on the platform.
- FFmpeg (LGPL-2.1), RmlUi (MIT), SDL3 and SDL3_image (Zlib), FreeType, Noto Sans (OFL-1.1).
Portions of this software are copyright © The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org). All rights reserved.
Full licence texts: NOTICE.