Eternal Darkness for the PlayStation 5

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (GameCube, 2002) as PS5 homebrew, title PPSA99314, at 4K and 60 frames a second, built from Eternal Darkness Recomp and your own disc. Version 0.9.5.

European disc only. You need your own image of the European GameCube disc, GEDP01. The USA disc (GEDE01) is not supported.

What you need

• A PS5 that runs homebrew (etaHEN or similar), with ShadowMountPlus and an FTP server (port 2121).
• Your own image of the European disc: an .iso or .gcm file (not a compressed RVZ or CISO).
• On your computer: an FTP program (FileZilla, for example) and a program that opens .7z files (7-Zip on Windows, Keka or The Unarchiver on a Mac).

Set it up

1. The game

1. Download EternalDarkness-PS5-....zip from the latest release and unzip it. You get a folder called PPSA99314.
2. Copy that folder to the console over FTP, as /data/homebrew/PPSA99314/.
3. Copy your disc image into /data/homebrew/PPSA99314/dump/. Any file name works.

2. The HD textures (recommended)

Two downloads, both DDS:

Download	What it is	Size
Eternal Darkness HD Texture Pack by Zombie	The game's textures redrawn at four times the detail	2.9 GB .7z
PAL supplement by Eternal Darkness Recomp	What the pack misses on the European disc: the Jump to Game, Options and Language screens and the title menu's words, and highlights without hard edges	13.2 MB .zip

1. Unpack both on your computer. Each one gives you a folder.
2. Make a folder called textures in /data/homebrew/PPSA99314/ and copy both folders into it. The pack is a few GB, so this takes a while.

Leave both folders as they are: the supplement replaces some of the pack's textures on purpose, and a folder with supplement in its name always wins. DDS stays compressed in the console's graphics memory, a quarter of the room PNG takes.

The pack is the work of Zombie, shared on the Dolphin forums.

3. Check the folder

When you're done it looks like this:

/data/homebrew/PPSA99314/
├── eboot.bin, sce_sys/, res/, ...
├── dump/
│   └── your disc image (.iso or .gcm)
└── textures/
    ├── GED DDS 1.0/
    └── Eternal Darkness HD Texture Pack PAL supplement/

The first line is what came in the release zip. GED DDS 1.0 is Zombie's pack; the folders' names don't matter.

4. Play

1. Start Eternal Darkness from the home screen.
2. The first start reads the game's program from your disc, which takes a second or two. Then the launcher shows your disc.
3. Choose New game.

The defaults are already the best picture: 4K, widescreen, HD textures on and sharp baked shadows. In Options > Game, HD textures should say On, and its note gives the number of textures it found.

If something's wrong

• It isn't on the home screen: restart ShadowMountPlus (or the console).
• The launcher's Disc says None found: the image isn't in dump/, or it's a compressed RVZ or CISO. A USA disc shows up but can't be played.
• HD textures says No pack: the pack isn't inside textures/. Check the folder against the one above, then close the game and start it again: it looks for the pack as it starts.

Updating

Copy a new release's PPSA99314 folder over the old one. Saves, settings, your disc and the textures stay as they are: saves and settings live in /data/homebrew/PPSA99314/ (saves/, settings.ini, and the memory cards ed-GEDP01-slot-a.dolcard and ...-slot-b.dolcard).

The game's files (its program, graphics, sound and music) come from your disc.

What is better than on the GameCube

• 4K at 60 frames a second, with full colour (no 6-bit banding). Options can also draw at 720p, 1080p or 1440p.
• 120 frames a second on a TV with a 120 Hz mode (VRR): Options > Display > Frame rate draws a blended frame between each of the game's own (turn on Enable 120 Hz Output in the console's Screen and Video settings).
• Cutscene fast-forward: hold R1 while a scene or movie plays to run it at up to four times the speed.
• Camera options (Options > Game > Camera): the game's own fixed cameras, Third person (beta) (behind the character you play, turned with the right stick, up and down for closer or further, kept inside the room by the game's own collision) or First person (beta) (through their eyes, looking around with the right stick). Both hold still while you aim.
• Widescreen: the game's own 16:9 mode (more of the room at the sides, not stretched) with the HUD and prompts at the screen's edges; 4:3 too.
• New baked shadows (below): the rooms' light and shadow redrawn sharp.
• Crisp game text: the game's lettering redrawn in two styles, Sharp or Tome (old typefaces), or Original as on the disc.
• HD texture packs in Dolphin's format.
• Modern controls and remapping, with PlayStation button prompts, the game's own prompts included (the icons below are the game's own): every GameCube button picture in the game, the Tome's controls page and the organ's notes included, shows your controller's buttons.
• Save anywhere: the pause menu has four save slots that hold the whole moment, besides the game's own memory-card saves (slots A and B).
• A launcher: Continue, New game or any save slot straight from the start.
• Problem reports: if the game stops responding, stops or crashes, it says so on screen and writes a report to saves/reports/ (fetch it over FTP and send it with a few words on what you were doing).
• Shaders ready: the title ships the shader caches a console made, so a fresh install starts without compiling them.

Controls

Action	Modern (default)	Original (GameCube positions)
Move
Attack / Confirm	or
Action / Cancel
Target / Aim	or
Sprint	toggle, or hold
Creep	toggle
Reload
Quickcast
Spells
Game's pause menu
This port's menu (saves, options)

In the game's own menus L1 and R1 page left and right. Options > Controls switches layout, makes Sprint, Creep and Target hold or toggle, sets the stick deadzone and vibration, and Button mapping rebinds any action (that layout is Custom).

The new baked shadows

Eternal Darkness lights its rooms with pre-drawn light maps: the window light on the floors, the shadows under the furniture, the glow of the lamps. On the disc they are small and compressed, so at 4K their edges break up into blocks and smears. With Options > Game > Baked shadows: Sharp (the default) each room's light maps are rebuilt four times larger as the room loads, with the compression blocks evened out and edges doubled along their own direction, so light and shadow keep clean edges. Original shows them as on the disc.

How it works

• vendor/edrecomp is the recomp (a submodule): its host layer, launcher and build. What the console needs changed in it is ps5/patches/edrecomp.patch, every hunk behind __PROSPERO__.
• ps5/tools/setup-source.sh fetches the two projects the recomp builds on at its pins (DolRecomp, GXRuntime) with its patches and then the console's (ps5/patches/gxruntime.patch), builds the recompiler for the build machine, and translates main.dol from the disc in dump/ into gamedata/<id>/.
• Graphics are GXRuntime's gxcore renderer on Aurora and Dawn (WebGPU), Dawn's Vulkan backend running on the RADV driver linked into the title (PS5_Vulkan). ps5/patches/dawn.patch adds the console to Dawn: the driver linked in, and the output as a VK_KHR_display surface. SDL3 gets the console's video, audio and pad drivers (ps5/sdl, ps5/patches/sdl.patch).
• ps5/src/startup.c runs before the game: klog, the title folder as the working folder (the recomp finds generated/main.dol, dump/<id>.iso, res/, saves/ and settings.ini there) and the caches in cache/.
• ps5/shader-cache holds the shader caches a console filled (Dawn's dawn_cache.db and the driver's radv-shader-cache). link-title.sh puts them in res/shader-cache and startup.c copies them into place on a start that has none. Take them from a console again after a change to Dawn, Mesa or the shaders.

Build

From macOS, through the Lima VM ps5 that holds the PS5 stack (PS5_Vulkan, PS5_Mesa, PS5_PayloadSDK, LLVM 22):

git submodule update --init
cp /path/to/GEDP01.iso dump/            # your own European disc
ps5/tools/vm.sh build                   # -> dist/PPSA99314/
ps5/tools/vm.sh deploy                  # FTP to the console (PS5_HOST)
ps5/tools/vm.sh run                     # launch and follow klog

On the console the title folder also needs the disc, dump/<id>.iso under /data/homebrew/PPSA99314/; the title reads generated/main.dol out of it on its first start (ps5/tools/console.sh game-files copies both instead). ps5/tools/package-release.sh VERSION zips dist/PPSA99314/ for a release, with an empty dump/ for the disc. ps5/tools/console.sh also deploys and runs from macOS itself, for when the VM cannot reach the console, and writes the title's env.txt: KEY=VALUE lines the recomp reads as its environment (for example ED_QUICKLOAD=saves/slot1.state to start in a save, AURORA_GPU_TIME_LOG=1 for frame times in klog).

The home-screen art (ps5/art, converted by ps5/art/make-title-art.sh) is the port's own, made with ChatGPT in the look of the game's cover; nothing in it is from the game. The music that plays while the tile is highlighted is: the first 30 seconds of one of the game's insanity themes, in ps5/sce_sys/snd0.at9. ps5/art/make-title-music.sh remakes it from a disc (needs FFmpeg and ps5-at9-converter beside this repo).

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later, as Eternal Darkness Recomp and GXRuntime. The PS5 layer (ps5/src, ps5/sdl, ps5/tools) comes from the author's other PS5 ports. The title carries every component's licence text in licenses/ (the recomp's THIRD_PARTY.md lists them, and SDL, Dawn, Mesa and PS5_Vulkan are added).