A native PC build of LEGO Dimensions, made by statically recompiling the Xbox 360 release.
Download · Mods · Build it yourself · LEGO Dimensions Discord
I started this to answer one question: can a toys-to-life game be recompiled, and is a native PC port of LEGO Dimensions actually realistic?
The answer is yes, and this is the proof. It boots, plays, saves, loads DLC, and talks to a Toy Pad, as a normal Windows program.
This is not a claim to be the one correct way to play on PC. Emulation works, and the emulator projects did the groundwork that made this possible. If xenia, RPCS3, Cemu or shadPS4 serves you better, use them. I respect every project around this game and none of them are competitors.
There is a second reason, and it matters to me more than the first one. I want this to make someone else want to build something. If it gets one person curious enough to open a disassembler for the first time, it has already paid for itself.
So, to be blunt about what this is not: it is not a claim on the idea. Nobody's LEGO Dimensions port is blocked because this one exists. If a team gets together tomorrow and writes a better one from scratch, without using a single byte of what is here, that is exactly the outcome I was after and I will say so happily. Take the idea, ignore the code, do it properly.
And whatever you end up building — respect what other people are working on.
I would rather you hear this from me than guess.
Warning
Claude was used heavily as a development tool. It read disassembly and file formats with me, and wrote large parts of the runtime glue, the installer, the mod tooling and this page.
What it did not do is decide what to build or judge whether the result was any good. The goal and the scope were mine. The domain knowledge about this game, its Toy Pad, its saves and its archives came from years of community work, not from a model. And above all I played the game. Every "this is broken", "this feels off" and "this is finally right" came from a person in front of the actual thing. A model cannot tell you a world failed to load or a cutscene hung. That loop is what turned something that compiled into something that plays.
If you are skeptical about AI being used this way, that is fair and I will not argue with you. Judge it by whether it works.
No game data is included here. You bring your own, and the installer checks that it is the right one before it does anything.
Have ready:
-
The Xbox 360 disc, dumped and extracted. Dump your disc to an ISO, then extract that ISO to a folder with a tool like extract-xiso or Xbox Image Browser. The installer wants the folder, not the ISO. It is right when the folder contains
Default.xexalongsideGAME.DATandGAME.HDR. Only the original release works, and the installer will tell you if yours is a different build. -
Title Update 23. Not 24, not 22. The recomp was built from the TU23 executable and will not run on anything else, so this one is checked by hash and a wrong update is refused. Give it either the raw package file, which is named
tu00000003_00000000and has no extension, or a folder holdingDefault.xexp,PATCH.DATandPATCH.HDR. -
DLC, optional. Point the installer at a folder holding your DLC packages and it takes all of them at once. You can also skip this and re-run the installer later to add them.
Then just run
DimensionsRecompiled-Setup.exe
and follow the wizard. It writes a README.txt next to the game with the
hotkeys, settings and save locations.
Updates are handled in game. Turn them off with F4 → Updates →
updates_check.
Out of the box the installer sets up the LEGO Toypad app, which stands in for the portal and lets you pick figures with a controller.
Your real Toy Pad works too. Windows hands it to its own driver, so swap that
once with Zadig: tick Options, List All Devices, pick
LEGO READER V2.10 (check the ID reads 0E6F 0241), choose libusb0, press
Replace Driver. Then in game press F4, open Input, untick toypad_emulation
and restart. The pad lights up and real figures work.
Note
For now, only the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 toypads are compatible.
To hand the pad back to Windows later, uninstall that driver in Device Manager.
The game can also start and stop the companion app for you: F4 → Toypad
→ toypad_app_autostart. It launches with the game and closes with it, and
an app you started yourself is left alone.
Any XInput pad works, and so does the keyboard, with no setting to find first:
| Keyboard | Controller |
|---|---|
WASD |
left stick |
| arrows | right stick |
J K H U |
A B X Y |
E Q |
LB RB |
I O |
LT RT |
Enter or Esc |
START |
Backspace |
BACK |
Every bind is editable in F4 under Input / Keybinds, with Rebind, Reset
and Clear on each line. Keyboard and pad are live at the same time. Mouse
look exists but is off by default: turn on mnk_mouse.
The game ships its official translations, and the recomp picks one the way the
console did, with a language ID. Set user_language in legodimensions.toml
while the game is closed, or find it in F4 under Kernel:
user_language = 4 # FrenchSome translations share a language ID and are told apart by the country instead,
so user_country picks between them. Both Spanish translations sit on one ID,
and French may behave the same way.
user_language = 5 # Spanish
user_country = 71 # ... as spoken in Mexico
|
|
Note
Russian is not one of the official languages. It exists as a community translation made by maickdelaia, shipped as a mod that replaces the English column.
Caution
It is playable, but it is not a finished port. Crashes, freezes, broken graphics and lost audio still happen, and finding them is why it is public. How well it runs varies by machine, because the graphics path still has to translate what the Xbox 360 GPU was asked to do.
Known issues:
- Starting a new save and quitting before the opening cutscenes finish can leave a save that will not load. Play until you are walking around first.
- 60 FPS is an unlock the original never ran at, and most remaining bugs
live there. Set
frame_rateto 30 inF4before reporting anything odd. - Some scenes render with wrong colours or missing effects.
- The Vulkan backend is broken. Direct3D 12 is the working one and the default.
- Not every code path has been visited, so an unexplored corner can still hit a hard stop rather than a graphical glitch.
Roughly in the order I want to get to it. No dates.
- Fixing the crashes that keep coming back. A handful of them are reproducible and hit a lot of people, so they matter more than anything new.
- Xbox 360 and Xbox One ToyPads support, so everyone can play the game how they want.
- UI fixes, and layouts for other gamepads. Right now the button prompts assume an Xbox pad. PlayStation, Switch and generic controllers should show their own.
- Mouse look. The keyboard now plays out of the box and every bind is
editable in
F4, but the mouse still has to be switched on by hand (mnk_mouse) and deserves proper tuning. - Updating the Discord Rich Presence so it shows more than a static line.
- Recompiling the GPU side too, in some form. Research, not a promise. Graphics is the one part still done the emulator way: the game's draw calls are translated while it runs. Doing to them what was already done to the CPU code, translating ahead of time instead of live, is where the remaining performance and most of the visual bugs are. It is a large piece of work and it may turn out not to be practical. I would rather say that now than promise it.
Important
This project needs people. It is one person plus a lot of community knowledge, and that is not enough for what is left. If you know graphics work, profiling, or Xbox 360 internals, and you actually care about this game running well, the optimisation work is wide open and I would genuinely welcome the help. Come say hello in the Discord or open an issue.
There is no emulator running underneath, and that is the point.
The Xbox 360 executable is PowerPC code. A tool translates it to C++ once, ahead of time, and a normal compiler turns that into a native x86-64 Windows program. Your CPU runs real x86 instructions. Nothing is interpreted at runtime.
What could not simply be translated is everything the game asked the console for:
| Part | How it works here |
|---|---|
| Game code (CPU) | Statically recompiled to native x86-64. No emulation. |
| Graphics | The Xbox 360 GPU command stream is translated at runtime to Direct3D 12. Inherited from emulator work, and where most visual bugs still are. |
| Kernel, saves, achievements, DLC | Reimplemented as host functions. Saves are real files. |
| Audio, input, windowing | Native. Any XInput controller, plus keyboard and mouse. |
| Toy Pad | A companion app over localhost, or a real portal over USB. |
The runtime providing all of that is the ReXGlue SDK, which derives from xenia. So: the CPU side is a port, the graphics side still stands on emulator research. Saying that plainly is more useful than overselling it.
The SDK needed changes to run this game, and they are not in this repository.
They are in a fork — NeverCookFirst/rexglue-sdk,
branch toypad-ui — along with the Toy Pad work, the input handling and several
crash fixes. Every release is built from that branch, so that is the SDK to use
if you want to reproduce one.
Because there is no interpreter tax, it can run at 60 FPS and use modern upscaling (FSR 1 and CAS) and higher internal resolutions.
Everything was developed and tested on one machine: Ryzen 7 5700X3D, RTX 4060, 32 GB RAM, Windows 11, 1080p. A mid range desktop, not a high end one.
That is the only machine this has been properly tested on, so I cannot promise stable performance on any device, including that one. This is a public beta. Steam Deck and handhelds have not been tested at all, and neither has anything running it through Proton or Wine.
Tip
Minimum: a 64-bit CPU with AVX2 (Haswell or Zen 1 and newer) and a Direct3D 12 GPU at feature level 11_0.
Tip
Laptops with an Nvidia GPU: if the frame rate is far worse than your
hardware should manage, the game is probably running on your integrated
graphics. With the GPU left on auto-select, the driver hands it the
integrated chip instead of your dedicated card. Fix it in Nvidia Control
Panel -> Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings: add
legodimensions.exe and set Preferred graphics processor to
High-performance NVIDIA processor. On AMD the same setting is AMD Software
Thanks to the players who worked this one out and reported it!
| Installed | Size |
|---|---|
| Base game plus Title Update 23 | about 9 GB |
| All 30 DLC packages | about 15 GB more |
| Everything | about 24 GB |
Open an issue.
The template asks for the few things that actually help: game.log, your
frame_rate, and your GPU.
- Unleashed Recompiled, first and above all. This project exists because of how much I loved what they did. Seeing a console game turned into a real native PC build is what made me ask whether LEGO Dimensions could be next.
- ReXGlue, right after them. It is the toolkit that does the actual recompiling and provides the runtime this game sits on. Without it there would have been nothing to try in the first place.
- The LEGO Dimensions Discord, for years of accumulated knowledge about this game and for encouraging every one of these experiments instead of dismissing them.
- harrysof, for the LEGO Toypad app and the Toy Pad protocol work everything portal related here builds on.
- xenia, whose research into the Xbox 360 GPU makes the graphics side possible at all.
- Everyone who tested a broken build or said it was a good idea before it obviously was one.
| Repository | What it is |
|---|---|
rexglue-sdk (branch toypad-ui) |
The runtime fork the releases are built from |
| DimensionsModLoader | Mod manager that injects files into the game's DAT archives |
| DimensionsSaveConverter | Converts saves between console versions |
| Xenia-Seamless-Toypad-Build | xenia fork with a built in emulated Toy Pad |
| RPCS3-Seamless-Toypad-Build | The same idea for the PS3 version |
| shadPS4-Seamless-Toypad-Bridge | Toy Pad bridge for the PS4 version |
The installer is one big unsigned executable that unpacks a payload into your game folder, which is exactly the shape heuristic scanners and SmartScreen do not like. It comes back clean: VirusTotal scan.
Windows will still put up "Windows protected your PC" the first time you run it. That is normal for anything unsigned. Click More info, then Run anyway.
The code here is MIT licensed, see LICENSE. That covers what I wrote. It does not cover LEGO Dimensions or any of its data. Bring your own game.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by LEGO, TT Games or Warner Bros.
There are no donations. Nothing here is sold, and nobody should be asking you for money for it.
Built by NeverCookFirst, logo by c0mpadre.