Stride-fitting the shrub body failed three times, so this attacks it from the other side: group spans by (count, data_offset, tail length) and byte diff every member of each group. Positions that differ across a group are geometry; positions that never differ are structure. The answer is blunt. 144 bytes vary in every group, whether that group has count 1, 2, 3, 5 or 6 and a tail of 192, 208 or 240 bytes. The varying data is not sized by count at all, which is why three stride guesses were fitting the wrong thing -- and why they kept looking nearly plausible. Those 144 bytes fall in runs of 6, every 8 bytes. The body is an array of 8-byte records: 6 varying bytes and 2 constant. The payload is not half-floats -- decoding as half3 gives 245.25 and -168.375, which no shrub has. The patterns (7ea5, 1ab6, 43d9, af80) and their repetition are VIF-packed data, the same quadruple-word packing moby and tfrag use. Filler around it is the PS2 NaN 0x7fff0000 rather than zeros, which is why the body read as noise in the earlier dumps. So the open question is the VIF code assignment, not the stride, and the decoder written for tfrag is the obvious place to start.
Going Commando
A native PC reimplementation of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (PlayStation 2, 2003), written in Rust.
The game is reimplemented, not emulated. There is no MIPS interpreter here and no CPU emulator: the systems are ported to Rust so they run as ordinary native code.
Status: initial scaffold. The disc is identified and verified, the
workspace builds, and nothing else is implemented yet. See
docs/roadmap.md for where things stand and what comes next.
The target
| Game | Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando |
| Platform | PlayStation 2 |
| Disc | SCUS_972.68 v1.01, USA Black Label |
| Video | NTSC, 60 Hz |
| Boot ELF SHA-1 | bacda860cbd6723142e86db56f197e47e728970f |
Verified against a real disc — see docs/disc-identification.md.
This is the build the reference projects pin; Greatest Hits v2.00 is a
different binary and is not the target.
No game content
This repository contains no game assets, no disc images, no BIOS dumps and no proprietary toolchains. You supply your own legally obtained copy of the disc as an input, the way the upstream reference projects do.
A pre-commit hook enforces this, blocking disc images, asset directories, container signatures and files over 50 MiB. If you clone elsewhere, enable it:
git config core.hooksPath .githooks
Layout
crates/
gc-formats/ asset format parsers (pure, no I/O beyond the caller's buffer)
gc-extract/ disc pipeline: identify, unpack, verify
gc-game/ game logic: hero, weapons, moby classes, progression, saves
gc-video/ IPU / MPEG-2 decode
gc-engine/ Bevy app: Graphics Synthesizer, VU0/VU1, renderer, frame loop
docs/
disc-identification.md which disc we build against, verified
roadmap.md phases, gates, current status
plan/ one file per subsystem, written as work proceeds
formats/ format specs, written as formats are reversed
tools/
identify-disc.py identify any Going Commando disc image
vendor/
rerac/ pinned upstream reference checkout (not tracked)
Building
Requires a Rust toolchain via rustup.
cargo check --workspace
cargo test --workspace
The host audio backend is disabled in Cargo.toml (see the comment there) so
that the workspace builds without system ALSA development headers. Audio decode
is the last phase of the port and lives in gc-video; re-enable it and install
alsa-lib-devel when that work starts.
Identifying a disc
python3 tools/identify-disc.py <your-disc.iso>
Reports the serial, version and video mode from SYSTEM.CNF, hashes the boot
executable, and warns when the disc is not the supported build. Reads only a
few megabytes, so it is near-instant.
How it will be verified
Visual and behavioural comparison against PCSX2, replaying recorded input and
comparing frames, level by level. The PS2 float model is reproduced rather than
approximated — see AGENTS.md.
Credits and licensing
This project learns from and is built on the work of others. Licences are
recorded in PROVENANCE.md and notices must travel with any
code derived from them.
- ReRAC — a native Rust/Bevy port of Ratchet & Clank (2002), the first game. ISC. The architecture this project follows.
- OpenRAC / rac2-gc-decomp — matching decompilation research for this game. MIT. Source of verified struct layouts and engine documentation.
- Wrench — community documentation of Insomniac's container formats. GPL, used as a specification reference only; no code is copied.
Ratchet & Clank is a trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment. This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Sony Interactive Entertainment or Insomniac Games.