Ninja's Dawn (Ninja Gaiden II recompilation)

This is a recompilation for the Xbox 360 game Ninja Gaiden 2 - No game material included See the README below for details.

   python local\diag\patch_missed_regs.py
   python local\diag\patch_scanguard.py
   tools\build.cmd Release

From the project's repository, fetched 2 h ago. Images load from GitHub.

1. v1.1.7 v1.1.7 - ultrawide: Start and Select menus open without a wide flash Latest 753 3 days ago
   Release notes

   Ultrawide fix: the Start and Select menus no longer show at full width before switching to 16:9.

   ---

   v1.1.7 - 2026-09-29

   Fixed - Ultrawide: the Start and Select menus showed at full width before switching to 16:9

   On an ultrawide display, opening the Start or Select menu during play showed
   the menu at full width for a moment and then switched it to 16:9: the fade to
   black that hides the switch began only after the menu had been on screen for
   about ten frames, and then took twelve more. The fade now begins on the first
   frame the menu draws and reaches black in five frames; the menu then fades in
   at 16:9 as before. Measured in play: Start to full black 0.44 s before, 0.17 s
   now. The Select menu is drawn by the game a little later after the button,
   and fades just as quickly once it appears. Closing a menu is unchanged.

   Upgrading: unzip over your existing install, or use the in-game updater. Settings, saves and texture packs are
   untouched. An old rexgpu-xenos.dll left in the folder is no longer loaded and can be deleted.

2. v1.1.6 v1.1.6 - ultrawide: leaving a shop no longer stretches the screen 310 4 days ago
   Release notes

   Ultrawide fix: leaving a shop no longer shows it stretched across the screen.

   ---

   v1.1.6 - 2026-09-29

   Fixed - Ultrawide: leaving a shop showed the shop stretched across the screen

   On an ultrawide display, leaving Muramasa's shop switched the picture to
   full width while the game was still cross-fading from the shop into play, so
   the shop's picture was shown stretched across the whole screen for about half
   a second. The switch now waits for the game's closing picture: the screen
   fades to black as soon as the shop closes, stays black while that picture is
   drawn, and fades in once, at full width, on gameplay - one fade, the way a
   level start already does it. A menu that closes without such a picture is
   unchanged. Checked in play at the shop, several times in a row
   (the log line [ng2uw] menu exit: held 16:9 for N frames says the hold ran).

   Upgrading: unzip over your existing install, or use the in-game updater. Settings, saves and texture packs are
   untouched. An old rexgpu-xenos.dll left in the folder is no longer loaded and can be deleted.

3. v1.1.5 v1.1.5 - test tooling only (no change for play) 125 4 days ago
   Release notes

   Test tooling only - no change for play; updating is optional.

   ---

   v1.1.5 - 2026-09-28

   Changed - test tooling only

   Nothing changes for play. The scripted-input channel used by the project's
   automated test runs (a pad_script.txt beside the program, absent in normal
   use) now keeps input open for a moment after its last command, so a menu that
   acts when a button is released receives it even when the game window is not
   in front. Updating is optional.

   ---

   Installing: unzip and run ng2.exe. You supply your own disc rip in game\ - no game data is included or
   distributed here. A GPU with Direct3D 12 is required.

   Upgrading: unzip over your existing install, or use the in-game updater. Settings, saves and texture packs are
   untouched. An old rexgpu-xenos.dll left in the folder is no longer loaded and can be deleted.

4. v1.1.4 v1.1.4 - settings that need a restart say so in red 51 4 days ago
   Release notes

   A menu change on top of v1.1.3: settings that only apply after a restart now say so in red, and changing one shows a RESTART REQUIRED banner.

   ---

   v1.1.4 - 2026-09-28

   Changed - settings that need a restart say so plainly

   Settings that only apply when the game starts (the window, the resolution,
   the internal resolution and a few others) were marked with a small
   "restart required" beside them, easy to miss. They now say
   takes effect after a restart in bright red, and changing one puts a red
   RESTART REQUIRED banner at the top of the menu, saying the change is
   saved and applies once the game is started again. The note at the bottom
   of the menu is red too.

   Several of those settings - Monitor, Resolution, Frame rate, Internal
   resolution, Sharpening - showed no mark at all: it was drawn past the edge
   of their row and cut off. It now sits under the setting when it does not fit
   beside it.

   ---

   Installing: unzip and run ng2.exe. You supply your own disc rip in game\ - no game data is included or
   distributed here. A GPU with Direct3D 12 is required.

   Upgrading: unzip over your existing install, or use the in-game updater. Settings, saves and texture packs are
   untouched. An old rexgpu-xenos.dll left in the folder is no longer loaded and can be deleted.

5. v1.1.3 v1.1.3 - texture dumping works in a new folder 6 4 days ago
   Release notes

   Enhanced-texture fixes on top of v1.1.2 (the fully native release): dumping works in a new folder, switching the pack reloads less, and the texture menu and counters tell the truth about the pack.

   ---

   v1.1.3 - 2026-09-28

   Fixed - texture dumping wrote nothing into a new texture folder

   Turning on "Dump while playing" with a texture folder that had no dump
   subfolder yet wrote no files at all: nothing created that subfolder, every
   write failed without a word, and the upscaler then reported that there was
   nothing to upscale. A folder that already had one (from an earlier setup)
   was unaffected. The game now creates dump when dumping starts, and says in
   its log if a texture cannot be written.

   Checked end to end on an empty folder: dump while playing, upscale with the
   built-in upscaler, then play with the resulting pack.

   Changed - switching the texture pack (F9) or dumping reloads less

   Switching the enhanced textures on or off, or dumping on or off, used to drop
   the whole graphics cache in the middle of play, including the game's own
   rendered images. A switch now reloads only the textures that come from the
   game's data, which is all the pack or the dump needs. In the Fable II port the
   full reload could leave frames washed white, red or cyan; it was not seen in
   this game, and the lighter reload keeps it that way.

   Fixed - the texture menu made a full pack look nearly empty

   The Textures section led with figures about the dump folder, so a pack of
   tens of thousands of textures could read as "37 in the pack". It now says
   first how many enhanced textures the pack holds, and labels the rest as the
   dump folder's. A dumped texture also counts as covered when the pack has the
   same image under another address - the way the game itself matches them - and
   "Process textures" no longer redoes those.

   Fixed - the count of enhanced textures in use was wrong

   The "enhanced loaded" figure showed only one of the three ways a texture is
   swapped for its enhanced version, so it could say a few hundred while a few
   thousand were in use, and jumped back to an old number after F9 off and on.
   It now counts them all, and restarts when the pack is switched.

   ---

   Installing: unzip and run ng2.exe. You supply your own disc rip in game\ - no game data is included or
   distributed here. A GPU with Direct3D 12 is required.

   Upgrading: unzip over your existing install, or use the in-game updater. Settings, saves and texture packs are
   untouched. An old rexgpu-xenos.dll left in the folder is no longer loaded and can be deleted.

6. v1.1.2 v1.1.2 - fully native: no GPU plugin 142 5 days ago
   Release notes

   The fully native release. Ninja Gaiden II's graphics now run entirely inside ng2.exe: the game's Xbox 360 GPU
   commands are decoded on its own thread and drawn by a Direct3D 12 renderer built into the program. There is no GPU
   plugin any more (rexgpu-xenos.dll is gone). Checked by walking every chapter from a full set of saves on the native
   renderer - no unhandled command, no failed draw - by playing the Chapter 10 boss fight, and by walking six chapters
   again on this exact build.

   v1.0.25, v1.1.0 and v1.1.1 were test builds and were never published, so their notes are included below, newest
   first. (v1.1.0's "Native renderer" settings row was retired in v1.1.1: the native renderer is now the only path.)

   ---

   v1.1.2 - 2026-09-28

   Changed - drawing moved off the game's thread

   The game's graphics commands are still read on the game's own thread, but the
   Direct3D 12 recording of its draws now happens on a thread of its own, fed in
   order, with every fence and interrupt kept behind the draws before it. In the
   heaviest scene measured (the Chapter 4 boss fight, about 3,000 draws a frame)
   that takes about 4.4 ms a frame off the game's thread, and the game never
   waits for the drawing thread. The frame rate was already a steady 60; this is
   headroom for high internal resolutions and busy fights.

   Fixed - hitches when a stage streams in new enhanced textures

   With the texture pack on, walking into a new area could freeze the picture
   for 50-200 ms (3-4 times in four minutes of Chapter 14). The pack prepares a
   stage's textures ahead of time, but only up to 1.5 GB, and a whole stage can
   need more (Chapter 14: 2.2 GB), so the rest were built during play. The limit
   now follows the graphics card - 30% of its video memory, up to 4 GB - so a
   card with enough memory prepares the whole stage: 0 such hitches in the same
   walks. Cards with less memory get the same budget as before.

   Changed - fully native, now also in the documentation

   The README no longer describes a GPU plugin: the renderer is part of this
   project and built into ng2.exe.

   v1.1.1 - 2026-09-28

   Changed - fully native: rexgpu-xenos.dll is gone

   The game's graphics now run entirely inside ng2.exe: the console's command
   stream is read by the program itself and every frame is drawn by its own
   Direct3D 12 renderer. rexgpu-xenos.dll is no longer shipped or loaded, and
   the "Native renderer" settings row is retired - there is only one path. A
   machine without Direct3D 12 gets a message box instead of a black window.
   Checked by walking every chapter from the saves list (no unhandled command,
   no failed draw) and by playing the Chapter 10 boss fight.

   Frames are handed to the window by a present thread of their own, so the
   game thread no longer waits for the copy to the screen.

   Added - F10 "Internal resolution"

   One row listing real render resolutions up to 8K (the world at up to 720p
   times an integer scale).

   Fixed

   • Chapter 10: the boss cinematic went black after its first frame and Ryu's

     shadow was a box. The renderer now uses the pixel-shader render-target
     path (ROV) the game's settings ask for; it had silently fallen back to a
     path this game cannot use.

   • Ultrawide, boss health bar (verified on the Chapter 4 boss): the bar now drops

     with each hit. Before, the damage showed outside the bar and the red fill
     sprang back, because the bar's cut and its plain-colour layers were not
     moved into the 16:9 HUD band with the rest of the bar.

   • Ultrawide, level start: no more flash of the stage before the loading

     icon; after a chapter card the screen holds black and the level fades in
     at full width.

   • Ultrawide, scene transitions (Chapter 7 door and others): full-screen

     transition images are no longer squeezed into the centre with the world
     showing on the sides.

   • Enhanced-texture pack: replacement textures are released with the rest of

     the texture cache and count toward its memory budget, fixing a memory
     climb over long sessions.

   ##…

7. v1.0.24 v1.0.24 - installing leaves the setup screen ready 1.2k 11 days ago
   Release notes

   Changed - Installing from a disc image now leaves the setup screen ready

   After an install finished, the setup screen re-checked the game folder but not
   the downloadable content or the saves, so both still showed whatever they had
   found before - and the next step was pressing Rescan twice rather than Play.
   All three are now re-checked once when an install completes.

   The save folder is only re-scanned when one has been chosen, which is the same
   condition that enables its own Rescan button: that scan also queues the saves it
   finds for import, so running it against nothing would clear a queue nobody asked
   to clear.

   Fixed - The Resolution setting described ultrawide as impossible

   The help text on Resolution said that on a wider-than-16:9 screen the picture is
   pillarboxed with Keep aspect ratio on and stretched with it off. That is true
   only with Ultrawide (3D) turned off, and it was the whole description - so
   choosing an ultrawide resolution read as a choice between black bars and a
   distorted picture, while the setting that fixes it sat four rows below with a
   description that never mentioned resolution.

   Both settings now refer to each other. Nothing about how they work has changed:
   Ultrawide (3D) has been selectable on the first-run setup screen, and not greyed
   out, since it was added.

   ---

   Installing: unzip and run ng2.exe. You supply your own disc rip in game\

   • no game data is included or distributed here.

   Upgrading: unzip over your existing install, or use the in-game updater.
   Settings, saves and texture packs are untouched.

8. v1.0.23 v1.0.23 - ultrawide and the scene fades are back 16 11 days ago
   Release notes

   Fixed - Ultrawide and the scene fades are back (regression in v1.0.22)

   v1.0.22 shipped a GPU runtime that did not contain the ultrawide support. On a
   wider-than-16:9 screen the 3D stopped filling the width and sat between black
   bars, and the full-screen scene fades - the start menu fade and the 2D chapter
   background fading into the 3D - were pillarboxed with it. Turning "Keep aspect
   ratio" off did not recover it; it stretched the picture instead, because the
   field of view was no longer being widened to compensate.

   Ninja Gaiden II's ultrawide is not one piece of code. The GPU plugin widens the
   3D projection, and the runtime decides whether the finished frame fills the
   screen or is pillarboxed - gameplay fills, menus and videos stay 16:9. The two
   halves talk through a shared setting. v1.0.22 carried a plugin that could widen
   and a runtime that could not fill, so the widen had nowhere to go.

   The release now ships a runtime that carries it, and the packaging step refuses
   to build a release whose runtime or plugin has lost an NG2 feature - the check
   that existed before compared where each file came from, not what was inside it,
   which is how this got out.

   Fixed - An interrupted update no longer leaves a half-updated install

   The updater waited up to two minutes for the game to exit and then copied the
   new files whether it had exited or not. If a file was still locked the copy
   stopped part way through and the game was relaunched with some files new and
   some old. The executable, the runtime and the GPU plugin are one matched set;
   a mismatched one exits during startup with no error and an empty log.

   It now refuses to start if the old process is still running, and stages every
   file beside its destination before moving any of them into place, so an update
   either applies completely or leaves the working install exactly as it was.
   Either way the reason is written to update\last_error.txt.

   ---

   Installing: unzip and run ng2.exe. You supply your own disc rip in game\

   • no game data is included or distributed here.

   Upgrading from v1.0.22: unzip over your existing install, or use the
   in-game updater. Settings, saves and texture packs are untouched.

   If you are on v1.0.22 and your screen has black bars either side during
   gameplay, this release is the fix.

9. v1.0.22 v1.0.22 - a rare hang or texture corruption during heavy streaming 48 11 days ago
   Release notes

   Fixed - A rare hang or texture corruption during heavy streaming

   The GPU plugin uploads texture and buffer data through a pool of copy workers.
   Those workers are handed a batch of jobs at a time, and a worker draining one
   batch could claim a job belonging to the NEXT batch - one queued while it was
   still working. It then decremented a counter that had been sized for the batch
   it started on.

   Both outcomes were bad. The counter could wrap past zero, and the frame waits
   forever on a count that never reaches it - the game hangs. Or the batch is
   declared finished early, and the GPU reads an upload buffer while a worker is
   still writing into it - which is not a hang but corrupt data, drawn.

   Ninja Gaiden II's own streaming is what exposed it: an assertion added to catch
   the case fired once in 41,400 frames, in a chapter load. That is rare enough to
   have been dismissed as a one-off crash for a long time, and frequent enough to
   reach players.

   The earlier attempt at this fix pinned each worker to the batch's generation
   number, which made it rarer rather than impossible - the generation only changes
   when a batch starts, while the jobs for the next one are queued before that, so
   a worker could still be pinned to the right generation and reach the wrong work.
   Workers are now pinned to the batch's END, so a worker cannot claim past the
   batch it woke for however much the queue grows behind it.

   This is a change to the shared GPU plugin, not to the game code, so no settings
   or saves are affected. The plugin in this release is the v1.0.20 engine base
   with only the two copy-pool fixes applied, rather than a newer engine - the
   smallest change that carries the fix.

   ---

   Installing: unzip and run ng2.exe. You must supply your own disc rip in
   game\ - no game data is included or distributed here.

   Upgrading from v1.0.21: unzip over your existing install. Your settings,
   saves and texture packs are untouched. Only ng2.exe and rexgpu-xenos.dll
   change; rexruntime.dll is deliberately the same binary as v1.0.21.

10. v1.0.21 v1.0.21 - no more settings that speed the game up 1.7k 17 days ago
    Release notes

    Two settings that changed game speed while presenting as smoothness or tearing
    controls are no longer offered.

    Frame rate: 120 Hz and 144 Hz are gone

    The row now offers 30 Hz and 60 Hz.

    Ninja Gaiden II paces its own logic off the refresh rate it is told the display
    has. Above 60 it does not render more smoothly, it runs faster — combat,
    physics and timers all speed up — and a player who selected 144 hit a crash. The
    row previously carried a line saying "Above 60 the game runs faster, not
    smoother", which was not enough: a menu is a promise that every option is a valid
    choice, and a warning under a broken one does not make it one.

    V-Sync is gone, for the same reason

    Off raised the guest vblank from 60 Hz to 1000 Hz, and this title advances its
    logic on vblank — so it was a game-speed control wearing the name of a tearing
    control. Anyone turning it off for input latency, as they reasonably might on any
    other game, got a game running many times too fast.

    Your existing settings still load

    Both fields still parse, so an existing ng2_settings.cfg opens as before. A file
    holding fps=144 or vsync=0 is simply brought back to 60 Hz and V-Sync on. The
    safe value is forced in the settings clamp and in the tuning that reaches the GPU
    plugin, not just hidden in the menu, so a hand-edited file cannot reintroduce the
    speed-up either.

    Not shipping: frame interpolation

    An attempt to give the smoothness those options implied without the speed-up —
    synthesizing an in-between frame so the display could run at 120 while the
    simulation stayed at 60. It worked, and was measured working in gameplay at an
    evenly-paced 120 fps with the simulation still at 60. It is not here because it
    hung the game on roughly 60% of heavy scene loads, for a structural reason rather
    than a fixable bug. The full reasoning and measurements are kept for anyone who
    revisits it.

11. v1.0.20 v1.0.20 - Scene-transition fades are now ultrawide 1.5k 19 days ago
    Release notes

    ng2recomp v1.0.20

    Fixed - Scene-transition fades are now ultrawide

    The black fades that bracket every in-engine scene - chapter intros, boss-defeat
    scenes, in-engine cutscenes, area transitions - now fill the full ultrawide
    screen. Before, a fade showed as a centred 16:9 black band with the FOV-widened
    3D leaking through on the two sides.

    NG2 draws a fade as a full-screen 2D solid fill. Ultrawide compresses 2D UI to a
    centred 16:9 band so the HUD does not stretch - and that was shrinking the fade
    too. The fade is now told apart from the HUD by its rendering signature: a 2D UI
    draw that samples no texture (a solid fill). Measurement across gameplay, combat,
    menus and cards showed the fade is the ONLY such draw - the HUD, menus and
    chapter cards are all textured - so the fade is left uncompressed and covers the
    whole screen while everything else stays 16:9. This is general: any in-engine
    fade drawn this way is widened automatically, on any chapter. Verified in-game
    (fade-in and fade-out) with the HUD, weapons menu and chapter cards unaffected.

12. v1.0.19 v1.0.19 - Ultrawide follows the game's pause/menu state 8 19 days ago
    Release notes

    ng2recomp v1.0.19

    Improved - Ultrawide uses the game's own pause and menu state

    Ultrawide (3D) now decides 16:9 versus ultrawide from Ninja Gaiden II's own
    state instead of only counting 3D-versus-2D draws each frame - a count that
    could not tell a paused weapons menu (the world is still drawn behind it) from
    an in-engine cinematic or a Ninpo cast (whose 2D effects spike the count, which
    is what used to make them briefly flip to 16:9).

    • **The pause / weapons (START) menu is now correctly 16:9 while cinematics and

      Ninpo stay ultrawide.** Two game globals that are set only while the pause menu
      is open - found by live memory analysis and confirmed across combat, jumps and
      Ninpo casts - drive the switch: opening the menu pillarboxes to 16:9 and
      closing it returns to ultrawide, and a Ninpo cast or an in-engine cutscene no
      longer flashes 16:9.

    • No more 16:9 flip during boss fights or Ninpo. The old draw-count ratio

      guess that caused those is gone.

    Scene-transition fades still show 16:9 (pillarboxed) - making them fill an
    ultrawide screen without stretching the HUD is queued as a follow-up, because
    the game draws a fade as a 2D layer at its own 16:9 extent. Ultrawide (3D), the
    v1.0.18 crash fixes, and everything else are unchanged.

13. v1.0.18 v1.0.18 - crash fixes (Ninpo/boss + chapter 12->13) 4 19 days ago
    Release notes

    v1.0.18 - 2026-09-14

    Fixed - two crashes that slipped back into v1.0.17

    Two recompilation fixes that live as post-generation patches were silently lost
    when the translated game code was last regenerated, so v1.0.17 shipped without
    them. Both are restored:

    • A crash when using Ninpo / during a late boss. A code fragment reached by

      a branch inside one function had its saved registers re-initialised to zero
      instead of carried across, so it wrote through a null pointer. Restored the
      register hand-off (patch_missed_regs).

    • A crash at the Chapter 12 -> 13 transition. The end-of-chapter effect-list

      scanners were not null-guarded, so a freed (null) list walked off into
      unmapped memory. Restored the guard (scanguard).

    Ultrawide (3D) and everything else in v1.0.17 are unchanged.

14. v1.0.17 v1.0.17 - Ultrawide (3D) field of view 4 19 days ago
    Release notes

    v1.0.17 - 2026-09-14

    Added - Ultrawide (3D) field of view

    A new Ultrawide (3D) switch on the Display screen widens Ninja Gaiden II's
    horizontal field of view to fill a wider-than-16:9 monitor with correct
    proportions: the world, characters, enemies and effects all show more across
    the width, with no stretching, and the vertical view and depth are unchanged.
    It is scene-aware - actual gameplay fills the screen while full-screen menus,
    videos and the in-game HUD stay 16:9 (pillarboxed with black bars on an
    ultrawide), so 2D art is never stretched. It takes effect immediately, with no
    restart, and is off by default.

    Under the hood the GPU plugin scales the horizontal column of each 3D draw's
    projection (a Hor+ widen that is mathematically exact), detects gameplay from
    menus by how much 3D versus 2D each frame draws, and caches the per-shader
    projection location so the widen costs no measurable frame rate.

    Fixed - the on-screen FPS readout now shows the game's frame rate

    The F8 FPS number was counted once per host present, so on a high-refresh
    monitor with V-Sync it showed the display's rate (e.g. 165) rather than the
    game's. It is now counted from the game's own main-loop frame, so it reflects
    how fast the game is actually running.

    Changed

    The fine field-of-view slider from an earlier internal build was removed; the
    Ultrawide toggle alone picks the correct field of view for the monitor.

15. v1.0.16 Ninja's Dawn v1.0.16 10 19 days ago
    Release notes

    To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.16-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it needs, the controller database and the texture tools including the AI upscaler engine - and no game assets or data of any kind. The executable contains the game's code in translated form; without your copy of the game it does nothing. Updating an existing install: unzip over it; game\, dlc\, user\ and your settings are never touched.

    Added - the game checks for updates on launch and can install them itself

    On start-up the game now asks GitHub whether a newer release exists and, if one does, shows a prompt: Update now, What's new, or Later. Choosing to update downloads the release zip and, after a confirmation, closes the game, swaps in the new program files and reopens - you never visit the website or unzip anything by hand.

    The installer only ever replaces the program (the executable, the runtime and GPU plugin, the Visual C++ runtime, the controller database and the texture tools). game\, dlc\, user\ and your settings files are never touched - the same contract as a manual "unzip over it" update.

    The check is a background network call that never delays the boot, and the prompt appears only when there is genuinely a newer version. A new setting, "Check for updates when the game starts" (on by default), turns the whole thing off for anyone who would rather keep launch offline; the F10 settings menu also has a Check now button and shows the download progress and the same install button. The launcher talks only to the GitHub releases API and downloads only the release asset over HTTPS; nothing else leaves the machine.

    Because this is the first version with the feature, an existing v1.0.15 install cannot offer it to you automatically - update to v1.0.16 once by hand, and from here on the game keeps itself current.

    The runtime and GPU plugin are the stock pair, unchanged since v1.0.13.

16. v1.0.15 Ninja's Dawn v1.0.15 4 20 days ago
    Release notes

    To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.15-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it
    anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a
    disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC
    packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it
    needs, the controller database and the texture tools including the AI
    upscaler engine - and no game assets or data of any kind. The executable
    contains the game's code in translated form; without your copy of the game it
    does nothing. Updating an existing install: unzip over it; game\, dlc\,
    user\ and your settings are never touched.

    Fixed - the bundled AI upscaler was never looked at

    v1.0.14 put the Real-ESRGAN engine in the zip at tools/upscaler/ and made
    AI the default, but the two places that decide whether the AI is available -
    the Textures page and the pack tool - still looked only in the texture
    folder's own upscaler/, where the Download button puts a copy. On a fresh
    install the page said "not installed yet", reset the method to Lanczos, and
    every pack was made with Lanczos. Both now check the texture folder first and
    the port's tools/upscaler/ second, and the log says which copy was found.

    Changed - the pack tool decides before it decodes, and holds paths, not pixels

    Phase 1 of a full run decoded every dumped texture in pure Python before
    asking whether it was art, and kept every decoded image in memory until phase

    2. The tool now turns render targets, fonts and HUD away by shape and format

       before decoding, reuses the decoded PNG beside each raw dump when it exists,
       and keeps only the path until the chunk that needs the pixels. The output is
       byte-identical to the old tool's (185 of 185 on a 300-texture sample of this
       game's dumps); on a 196,000-dump folder phase 1 went from hours to seconds.

    Fixed - continuing a stopped run no longer keeps the previous pack's files

    A run at new settings rewrites the manifest first and then overwrites the
    pack file by file. Stopped halfway, the next run continued it and counted
    every file already in the folder as done, including the ones the old settings
    had made. Files older than the manifest of a stopped run are now redone, and
    the "already in the pack" count no longer counts a texture twice when its
    decoded PNG is in the dump folder.

    The runtime and GPU plugin are the stock pair, unchanged since v1.0.13.

17. v1.0.14 Ninja's Dawn v1.0.14 4 20 days ago
    Release notes

    To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.14-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it
    anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a
    disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC
    packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it
    needs, the controller database and the texture tools - now including the AI
    upscaler engine - and no game assets or data of any kind. The executable
    contains the game's code in translated form; without your copy of the game it
    does nothing. Updating an existing install: unzip over it; game\, dlc\,
    user\ and your settings are never touched.

    Added - the AI upscaler ships in the zip, and is the default

    The Textures page has offered Real-ESRGAN since the pack tool existed, but a
    fresh install had to fetch the engine with the Download button first, and
    until then every upscale fell back to Lanczos. The release now carries the
    engine at tools/upscaler/ (Real-ESRGAN ncnn-vulkan with the x4plus model and
    its siblings - a local model that runs on your GPU, no account, no network;
    BSD-3, third party), and AI at detail strength 0.75 is the default for new
    settings. Existing settings files keep whatever they say. The choice came out
    of the ACME Texture Upscaler comparisons and a trial on real game textures the
    same day: the AI wins clearly on hard surfaces (wood grain, rivets, edges) and
    the strength blend keeps it from turning soft organic textures to speckle. The
    Download button stays for installs that lack the folder. The runtime and GPU
    plugin are the stock pair, unchanged from v1.0.13.

18. v1.0.13 Ninja's Dawn v1.0.13 8 21 days ago
    Release notes

    To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.13-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it
    anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a
    disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC
    packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it
    needs, the controller database and the texture tools, and no game assets or
    data of any kind. The executable contains the game's code in translated form;
    without your copy of the game it does nothing. Updating an existing install:
    unzip over it; game\, dlc\, user\ and your settings are never touched.

    Fixed - streamed textures (like chapter 10) can now be upscaled

    Some stages stream many textures through the same memory addresses, and the
    pack was matching them at the wrong moment, on stale bytes, so they fell back
    to the original however well you dumped. The match now happens when the texture
    is actually loaded, on its real content. Each texture keeps its normal version,
    always drawn, and gains a separate upscaled copy only when its content is in
    the pack, so nothing can go missing. Chapter 10 went from about 400 upscaled
    textures to about 1500 with the existing pack, at full frame rate. This applies
    to every chapter; dump and process a stage as before and the textures now take
    effect.

    Changed - texture dumping takes effect on the next launch

    Turning dumping on mid-stage quietly missed the start of the stage and
    everything already loaded. It is now a restart-required setting that captures
    the whole stage from its start on the next launch.

    Everything since v1.0.6 is included. Every issue and its fix:
    docs/ISSUES_AND_FIXES.md.

19. v1.0.12 Ninja's Dawn v1.0.12 4 21 days ago
    Release notes

    To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.12-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it
    anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a
    disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC
    packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it
    needs, the controller database and the texture tools, and no game assets or
    data of any kind. The executable contains the game's code in translated form;
    without your copy of the game it does nothing. Updating an existing install:
    unzip over it; game\, dlc\, user\ and your settings are never touched.

    Fixed - switching the texture pack with F9 a few times in a row crashed the game

    Every crash of this kind had the same stack: the GPU plugin reading a 4x pack
    file into a texture created at 1x while the pack was off. The plugin now
    records the replacement chosen when a texture is created, uploads that one,
    and refuses any file whose size does not fit the texture it is going into.
    This release carries the runtime and plugin pair with that change, so F9 can
    be pressed as often as wanted, mid-load included.

    Everything since v1.0.6 is included. Every issue and its fix:
    docs/ISSUES_AND_FIXES.md.

20. v1.0.11 Ninja's Dawn v1.0.11 3 21 days ago
    Release notes

    To play: download ng2recomp-v1.0.11-win-amd64.zip below, unzip it
    anywhere, run ng2.exe and point it at your own copy of Ninja Gaiden II (a
    disc image or an extracted disc folder) and, if you have them, your DLC
    packages. The zip holds the executable, the runtime, the Visual C++ runtime it
    needs, the controller database and the texture tools, and no game assets or
    data of any kind. The executable contains the game's code in translated form;
    without your copy of the game it does nothing. Updating an existing install:
    unzip over it; game\, dlc\, user\ and your settings are never touched.

    Fixed - collapsing the settings window crashed the game

    The arrow at the top left of the in-game settings window collapsed it, and
    the texture section then submitted its rows into a table that was never
    begun; the first row read through a null pointer inside the runtime. The
    window no longer offers the arrow (F10 closes it), a window that is not drawn
    ends early, and the table is guarded like every other on the page.

    Also new in the write-up: Windows keeps a crash dump for every crash the game
    has, and the catalogue now names four more crashes from the same evening that
    are still open, one of them a texture-pack upload after F9 was toggled twice
    a few seconds apart while a level streamed in.

    Everything since v1.0.6 is included. Every issue and its fix:
    docs/ISSUES_AND_FIXES.md.

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