Resident Evil Code: Veronica X is heading to PS Vita, built on a PS2 decomp

Rinnegatamante has posted the first video showcase of his work porting Resident Evil Code: Veronica X to the PS Vita. The news came through a post on r/vitahacks, submitted by /u/ziobleed1, and the video is up on YouTube.

The interesting part is the base. The port builds on a decompilation of the PS2 version, the recvx-decomp project. A decomp gives you readable source to work from instead of a pile of PS2 machine code, and that changes how much work a port takes. For a Vita hobbyist, it means a PS2 game is being rebuilt for handheld hardware from the code up, not just squeezed through an emulator.

The scene has been heading this way for a while. Static recompilation projects like Zelda64Recomp and UnleashedRecomp show what happens when someone turns old binaries into native builds. Decomp-based ports are the cleaner cousin of that approach. My opinion: they’re slower to start, because somebody has to reconstruct the code first, but once that base exists, a port like this gets much more practical. The real bottleneck is always the decomp itself.

The post doesn’t say how far along the port is, whether the full game runs, or when a build will reach players. Showcase videos are a good sign, but plenty of them never turn into a release. Until there’s a build, there’s nothing to try. Keep an eye on the channel and the project pages, and don’t go hunting for files from random sites.