Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal PS2 gets a decompilation project on GitHub

A new GitHub project is working to decompile Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal for the PS2 into C source code. The repo is OpenRAC/rac3-uya-decomp. It’s tagged decompilation, playstation-2, preservation, ps2 and ratchet-and-clank, and it had 19 stars when we checked.

That’s about all the source gives us. The page doesn’t say how far along the work is, whether the code builds back into a working image, or which regions and versions it covers. Judge it by commits, not promises.

Why should a hobbyist care? Decomp is the slower, more careful cousin of recomp. A recompiler translates machine code into something that runs natively on a PC, and it can get a game running fast. A decompilation tries to rebuild the original source, function by function, so people can read it, document it and eventually compile it for modern hardware. It takes longer. It also lasts longer, because you end up with a codebase humans can read, not a translated binary. The recomp scene has run on similar ideas with projects like N64Recomp and UnleashedRecomp, so the playbook isn’t new. A PS2 version adds a preservation angle, too. PS2 hardware keeps getting older, and discs don’t get cheaper. A clean codebase means you won’t need to dig the original disc out of a box every time you want to poke at the game.

How to try it: the source doesn’t list build steps, so there’s nothing to run yet. Watch the repo. If you want to play the game today, PCSX2 is the usual route, with your own disc and your own dump.

The interesting part is what happens next. A PS2 decomp that actually builds would be a big deal for the preservation crowd. For now it’s a repo with a name, some topics and a few stars.