A static recompilation of Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories (USA, SLUS-01411). The game's MIPS code is translated to C ahead of time and compiled into a native executable — it is not interpreted by an emulator.
A duel running natively. The menu bar across the top and the duel-rank meter beside the FIELD box are this project's, drawn in the game's own art.
On top of that sits a set of quality-of-life features built for this game: a live duel-rank meter, a fusion assistant that reads your actual hand, a card-drop multiplier with a proper results screen, a full drop-table manager in its own window — view, edit and share every duelist's drops — and a cheat menu. All drawn in the game's own art, all toggleable at runtime.
Built on PSXRecomp.
You bring your own disc. Nothing in this repository, and nothing in the download, contains any of the game's code or data — the screenshot above is just that, a screenshot. The C is generated on your machine, from your copy, the first time you run it.
| Serial | SLUS-01411 (USA / NTSC-U) |
| Players | 2 |
| Publisher | Konami, 1999 |
| BIOS | OpenBIOS, bundled — nothing to supply |
Everything below lives in the in-game overlay menu on F10, and every
setting takes effect immediately — no restart, no patched save.
The game grades every duel you win but only tells you afterwards. This puts the grade on screen while you play, in the game's own HUD sprites, lifted from its own VRAM. It tracks the picture through scaling and aspect changes and hides itself when a card view covers the box it labels.
| Mode | What you get |
|---|---|
OFF |
stock behaviour |
IN GAME |
the game's POW/TEC badge and rank letter, beside the FIELD box |
IN GAME + SCORE |
the same, plus the raw 0–99 score |
OVERLAY TEXT |
plain text in the corner — never covered by a card view |
Forbidden Memories has thousands of fusions and teaches you none of them. This reads the cards in your hand against the game's real fusion and equip tables in memory — not a copied list — so its answers are the game's answers, including the awkward three-step rule the game actually implements.
| Mode | What you get |
|---|---|
OFF |
stock behaviour |
NUMBERS |
pick order marked on the cards themselves |
NUMBERS + INFO |
pick order plus the name of the card it produces |
VIEW → SUGGEST FUSION BY chooses ATTACK or DEFENSE.
Stock, a won duel awards exactly one card. This makes it 1–99, so grinding a specific drop stops being a weekend.
It comes with a results screen stock never had: the cards you won across three pages you flip with D-pad Left/Right, with the game's own yellow New! tag on anything you didn't already own.
82 of the game's 722 cards are dropped by nobody — both of Exodia's legs among them, which is why the set cannot be completed by duelling in the stock game. This gives every one of them a source.
Nothing on your disc is touched: the duel loads the opponent's drop weights into memory and this rewrites that copy, so the change lasts as long as the duel does.
Placement is yours to change. On first run the mod writes
drop_missing_cards.ini into your player-data folder, listing every card by
name under the duelist that drops it:
[Weevil Underwood]
52 = 30, 20, 0 ; Hercules Beetle
278 = 30, 20, 0 ; Petit MothThe three numbers are the S/A POW, B/C/D and S/A TEC rates, as weights out of 2048 — 20 is about 1%. Each band always totals 2048, so what you add comes off that duelist's normal drops in proportion; the shipped table adds 1–6% each. Delete the file for the defaults back.
Opens a separate window you can move to another monitor and leave open while you play. It knows every card and every duelist's drop table — and it does not just show them. You can rewrite any duelist's drops and the game rolls what you wrote.
| View | What you get |
|---|---|
By card |
all 722 cards — id, name, type, ATK, DEF, how many tables drop it — sortable on any column, with every duelist that drops the selected one, the rank band needed, and the chance |
By duelist |
all 39 duelists, with everything they drop, the band, and the weight both raw and as a percentage |
Type to search by name or id, click a column heading to sort, scroll with the wheel or the scrollbars, click a row on the right to cross over into the other view. Weights are out of 2048, which is what lets one read as a percentage.
Editing. Click a weight and type a new one. Click the rank cell to move a
drop between bands. Right-click anything for the rest: add a card to a
duelist, move it, remove it. Or just drag a card out of the left list and
drop it on a duelist — the All CPU toggle lists every duelist under a
card, greyed where they do not drop it, so every one of them is a drop target
without leaving the view. Every band still totals exactly 2048 — whatever you
add or grow comes off that duelist's other drops in proportion, the same
arithmetic the game's own roll assumes — and an edit that cannot balance is
refused, not fudged.
Nothing is written until you press Save, which persists your table as
drop_table_edits.ini in your player-data folder (hand-editable, same format
as the mod's file). Defaults clears the selected duelist back to stock.
Sharing. Load… → Export the current table writes your table as a
timestamped file in drop_tables/ next to your saves — send it to someone,
they drop it in their own drop_tables/ folder and pick it from Load….
Loading replaces the edit layer in memory only; it too is nothing until saved.
If DROP MISSING CARDS is on, the manager shows — and edits on top of — the
table you will actually roll against: it runs the same transform the mod runs,
so the two cannot disagree, and your edits apply over the mod's placements.
Card names and ATK/DEF are read out of the running game; the drop tables are baked from your disc when you build. Duelist portraits are the game's FREE DUEL art and, like every other piece of Konami art here, are never shipped — the Manager reads them off your own disc the first time it opens, the same forty tiles the FREE DUEL screen loads, so every duelist has a face whether or not your campaign has met them. (If a disc image fails that read, the older fallback still applies: the game captures portraits from its own FREE DUEL screen as you browse it, and keeps them next to your saves.)
Change any of the 722 cards: name, description, face art, duel thumbnail, ATK, DEF, both Guardian Stars, type, level, attribute, price and password. The change shows up everywhere the card is drawn — the Library page, the chest's TRIANGLE viewer, the deck-edit list, the password screen and the duel itself — because it is applied where the game reads, not where it draws.
An edited card is a folder in your player-data:
cards/<id>/card.ini name = Blue-eyes Ultimate Dragon
color = purple (yellow, green, pink, blue, purple, orange)
description = Text with|a line break (| = new line; no | = wrapped at 20)
attack = 4500 defense = 3800
star1 = Sun star2 = Mars
type = Dragon level = 12 attribute = Light
price = 999999 password = 12345678
cards/<id>/art.png any size — becomes the 102x96 / 256-colour card face
cards/<id>/thumb.png optional; the 40x32 / 64-colour duel card, made from art.png when absent
cards/<id>/title.png optional 96x14 title strip; rendered from `name` when absent
Every key is optional and a missing one keeps the stock value, so a card that only changes its art keeps its numbers. Folders are watched: edit a file, or drop a new folder in, and the game picks it up within seconds — the next screen that draws the card shows the change. Nothing on your disc image or in your save is touched; the mod serves replacement disc sectors and table entries to the running game, and removing the folder restores stock.
The Card Manager window is the front end for that: pick a card, see the
face and thumbnail exactly as the game will stream them, type new values
(green = your edit, x = back to stock), step through stars, types and
attributes, Pick art… to install a PNG, Open folder to get at the files,
Save to write card.ini and apply it, Restore stock to undo the card.
Titles are rasterised in the game's own style (Times New Roman Bold, 12 px,
squeezed for long names) when a timesbd.ttf sits in cards/; without one,
a plain bitmap font is used.
The same card.ini carries what a card does, and the manager shows the
rows that make sense for the card's type:
effect = damage what a Magic card does when played (see the list)
amount = 2000 its number: LP healed or lost, the ATK threshold,
or how much the opponent's monsters lose
target = Dragon for effect = destroy_type
terrain = Yami for effect = field
ritual = 58, 58, 58 -> 26 for effect = ritual: three materials on your field -> result
equip_bonus = 1500 an Equip card's ATK/DEF bonus (stock 500, Megamorph 1000)
equips = Dragon, Warrior, 5, 12 the monsters it fits: types, card ids, all or none
(this REPLACES the stock list; leave it out to keep it)
boost = Dragon +1000, Fairy -500 a field card (Forest..Yami): each type's boost
trap_atk_max = 3000 a trap (House of Adhesive Tape..Widespread Ruin):
attackers at or under this ATK are stopped
Effects a Magic card can be given: none, heal, damage, destroy_type,
destroy_atk, raigeki (every opponent monster), dark_hole (both
fields), dragon_jar (their Dragons), stop_defense, flip (face-down
monsters up), weaken (opponent's monsters lose amount ATK and DEF; a
negative amount strengthens them), swords, cursebreaker, harpie
(their magic/trap zone), field, ritual. Any Magic or Ritual card can take
any of them; the game's own handler for that effect runs, with your number.
Equip compatibility, ritual recipes, field boosts and trap ceilings are the
game's own tables, served edited. Every one of these was verified in a live
Free Duel.
What stays as it is, because it is code rather than data: which cards count
as traps (only 681–686 have a ceiling), the trap's response, Goblin Fan /
Bad Reaction to Simochi / Reverse Trap / Fake Trap, weaken reaching only
the opponent's side, the guardian-star wheel, and the granularity of heal
(steps of 100, up to 25500) and damage (steps of 10, up to 2550).
Stock monsters do nothing but fight. The manager's Effects tab shows a monster's effects as a list of rules, one sentence each:
When [Summoned face-up] [50%] do [Destroy all monsters (Raigeki)]
When [Summoned face-up] [Otherwise] do [Destroy your own, lose half their ATK]
When [While face-up] do [Gain ATK/DEF] [500] per [each Lava Battleguard you control]
+ Add effect adds a line; the x at its end removes it. When is one of
Summoned face-up, Flipped face-up, Destroyed, Attacks, Your turn starts,
Opponent's turn starts, or While face-up. A triggered line rolls its odds
(Always, 90% … 5%); a line set to Otherwise runs only when the line
above it, on the same trigger, failed its roll, so chains like "50%: this,
otherwise: that, 25% on top" are three lines. A While face-up line either
gains ATK/DEF (an amount, once or per each monster you or the opponent
control, each card in a hand, a monster type, or one specific card picked
from the full card list) or sets how the monster fights (never destroyed
in battle, destroys its foe, destroys itself and its foe). Every list opens
on a click and filters as you type, so "lava" finds Lava Battleguard in the
722-card list. Immune to sits under the list, and the card text the rules
would put on the card is previewed beneath it; Effect text → description
writes it onto the card.
The same rules in card.ini:
battle = indestructible never destroyed in battle (its owner still takes the damage)
mutual destroys itself and whatever it battles
slayer destroys whatever it battles
on_summon = damage 1000 cast a magic effect when it lands face-up (set face-down, it is lost)
on_flip = raigeki ... when it is turned face-up: attacked, flipped, revealed
on_death = raigeki ... when it is destroyed (battle, trap or magic)
on_attack = heal 500 ... when it declares an attack
each_turn = damage 200 ... at the start of its owner's turn, while face-up on the field
opp_turn = heal 300 ... at the start of the opponent's turn
on_summon = 50%: raigeki; else: destroy_own_lp branches: each rolls its own odds, "else"
on_death = 25%: heal 1000; 25%: damage 500 fires only when the branch before it did not
bonus = 500, 200 per ally, 100 per enemy ATK and DEF while face-up on the field
500 per Lava Battleguard ... per face-up copy of a card, or a type
300 per enemy Dragon, 300 per hand ("per <card or type>" counts your side)
immune = traps, magic traps never fire on it; destruction magic passes it by
A face-down monster has no effect: its bonus and each-turn effect start when it is turned over.
The cast effects are the same list a Magic card can be given (heal,
damage, destroy_type Dragon, destroy_atk 1500, raigeki, dark_hole,
dragon_jar, stop_defense, flip, weaken 500, swords, cursebreaker,
harpie, field Yami), plus gamble, Time Wizard's coin: heads destroys
the opponent's monsters, tails destroys your own and half their total ATK
comes off your LP, and destroy_own / destroy_own_lp, which
destroy your own monsters (the second also costs half their total ATK in
LP), so the real Time Wizard is on_summon = 50%: raigeki; else: destroy_own_lp. They run through the game's own effect engine, with
the popup and sound the matching spell would show, the moment the duel is
idle after the trigger. A monster with any of these draws with the orange
effect-monster frame unless color says otherwise.
MODS → Card effects (or the Dev Card Effects button top-right in the
Card Manager) switches to a second, separate card set kept in
mods/card_effects/cards/: the original cards with their real effects
adapted to Forbidden Memories, built one card at a time in the Card
Manager. Turning it on asks first; while it is on, the manager, Export and
Import all work on that set, and your own cards/ edits sit untouched
until you switch back. It is off by default.
Effects added for it: destroy_strongest (the opponent's strongest monster
goes), lose_lp (you lose LP), coin_lp (tails: half your LP), equips
that fit an attribute (equips = Dark), and a bonus per card in your hand
(bonus = 300 per hand).
Export Config (top right of the manager, beside Dev Card Effects)
writes every edited card — card.ini and PNGs — plus your
drop_table_edits.ini to a single .ygocards file (a plain zip with a
manifest, so it opens anywhere). Import Config reads one, first showing
how many cards it holds, which of your edited cards it would replace and
whether it carries drop table edits, and only then replaces them. A file
re-zipped by hand, stored or deflated, imports too.
The text boxes edit like any other: click to place the caret, drag or
shift+arrows to select, double-click a word, Home/End, Ctrl+A/C/X/V with
the system clipboard. Pasted line breaks become the card's | break in
the description.
Export Descriptions (left of Export Config) writes the name and
description of all 722 cards as the game currently shows them — the active
set's edits where there are any, stock text otherwise, so a Card Effects set
exports too — to one plain text file, one block per card:
[3] Hitotsu-me Giant
A one-eyed behemoth
with thick, powerful
arms made for
delivering punishing
blows.
Edit it in any editor (a card shows six lines of twenty characters; the
header repeats the rules) and Import Descriptions reads the whole file back: every card is compared
with what the game shows, the ones that differ are written into that set's
card.ini files with every other key kept, and a text put back to stock
drops the key again. It shows live.
For translations: the campaign's dialogue (the story boxes, the duelists'
lines, the shop and so on: 150 texts) exports to one plain text file and a
translated file imports back at runtime, without touching the disc. The
window lists the texts with a search box, shows the original beside the
current text, and has Export… / Import…. The file is just words:
[1923]
Hmmm...
T'would seem I've won.
Many days have passed since
I taught you the game...
But you've still much to learn.
Now, please...
Return to the palace!
A blank line is a page break, a line break a line break, and nobody has
to count characters: a story box shows three lines of 36, and on import
longer lines are wrapped at a space and longer pages split into more
pages. The game's own codes (a portrait, a sound, a choice, a jump) show
as {1}, {2}… and only need to stay in order next to the same words;
{name} is the player's name. An imported file lives on as
dialogue/dialogue.txt in the player-data folder so it is back after a
restart; import replaces the whole set, texts left as they were stay
stock, and a file that fails to parse changes nothing. Translated texts
live in a spare memory arena and the game's text routines are redirected
to them by hooks; nothing in the game's code is patched.
The card shop has never sold a card. This makes it an actual card shop: the shopkeeper's menu grows a fifth row that buys card packs with your starchips.
Four pack types — monster, magic, equip, trap — across four rarities, priced 20 / 80 / 200 / 800 starchips. All 722 cards sit in a pool, so anything can come out. A pack deals its cards one at a time: each X turns over the next waiting slot, then you can move between them and press TRIANGLE to open the game's own card viewer on whichever one you like. Bought cards land in your trunk marked New!, exactly like a duel drop.
Prices, rarity bands and where individual cards sit are yours. The shop writes
card_shop.ini next to your saves on first run and re-reads it whenever
you leave the shop and come back:
[prices]
legendary = 800
[packs]
cards = 3 ; 1-3, the results box prints three
[monster]
legendary_atk = 2500 ; a monster lands in the highest band its ATK reaches
[cards]
Exodia the Forbidden One = legendary ; or `rare+legendary` for bothDelete the file for the defaults back.
16:9, contributed by yamyi.
Projected 3D — the duel field — renders genuinely wider; flat 2D screens stay
4:3 and are pillarboxed rather than stretched. Also available as a mod-catalog
feature (psx.enhancement.widescreen). Experimental, as the framework labels
this feature class: culling pop-in at the wide edges has not been fully
checked for this title.
| Row | Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
LIFE POINTS |
1–9999 | 8000 is stock. Applies to both duellists |
SHOW OPPONENT HAND |
on / off | their hand is drawn face-up, like yours |
FORCE FACE UP |
on / off | their set cards play face-up — and stay face-up |
STARCHIPS |
0–99999 | written straight to your save |
FREE SPENDING |
on / off | purchases succeed, the deduction is undone |
ALL CARDS |
1, 2 or 3 of each | fills the trunk. Apply with the chest closed |
Neither reveal is an overlay. SHOW OPPONENT HAND clears the one flag that
keeps their hand hidden, so you get their real sprites, names and ATK/DEF in the
game's own renderer. FORCE FACE UP clears the face-down bit, which is real
game state and not a drawing choice — a monster revealed that way genuinely is
face-up and will not flip when attacked. Turning it off stops new reveals; it
does not re-hide what has already turned over.
LIFE POINTS, SHOW OPPONENT HAND and FORCE FACE UP are preferences,
restored on every launch. The other three write live save data, so they are
deliberately not re-applied at startup and decline with a message until a save
is loaded, rather than writing over whatever else is in memory.
Also in the F10 menu, courtesy of PSXRecomp: save states, rewind (F8), an
emulation-speed multiplier, and GAME → FAST LOADING, which cuts disc loads
to near-instant. That one ships off; the setting persists once you turn it
on.
Xbox controllers work out of the box — plug one in, no setup. So do PS4 and PS5 DualShock/DualSense pads (rumble supported on DualSense), and Steam's virtual controller through Steam Input. The game is a PS1 title, so it starts in digital pad mode and the sticks map to the d-pad.
Very old DirectInput-only pads are the exception. DirectInput is off by default because enumerating it stalled startup by up to 40 seconds on some machines. Set
SDL_JOYSTICK_DIRECTINPUT=1in your environment to bring it back.
| PlayStation | Key | PlayStation | Key | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D-pad | Arrow keys | L1 | Q |
|
| ✕ Cross | X |
R1 | W |
|
| ○ Circle | S |
L2 | E |
|
| □ Square | Z |
R2 | R |
|
| △ Triangle | A |
L3 / R3 | T / Y |
|
| Start | Enter |
Select | Right Shift |
Mostly you need arrows to move, X to confirm, S to cancel.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
F10 |
Open the overlay menu — every feature on this page lives there |
F7 |
Save / load state |
F8 |
Rewind |
Tab |
Turbo (hold) |
Alt+Enter or Ctrl+F |
Fullscreen |
F |
Show performance stats |
Numpad + / - |
Volume |
Keys are stored in keybinds.ini next to the executable, in plain text with the
accepted names listed at the top. Edit it and restart. Each input takes an
optional second binding after a comma, so cross = X, Mouse1 binds both.
The download is a setup host — a small executable plus the recompiler and the framework source. It has no game code in it until you supply a disc.
- Run
Yu_Gi_Oh_Forbidden_Memories_Recompiled.exe. - It asks for your disc image and checks it against the CRC32 of the data track this build expects. A mismatch is refused, naming the release it needs and the one you gave it.
- It downloads a compiler if you have none, translates the game to C from your copy, and compiles it.
- It builds into
build-release/and starts the game.
Nothing needs installing first — the setup brings its own compiler and Python, and uses yours if you already have them.
A compiler download, a whole game translated to C, and a real compile happen before you see anything; the console window working away is not hanging. Every run after the first starts immediately.
That wait is the point. This download contains no game code and no game assets — not the executable, not the sprites, not even the font. All of it is produced on your machine, from the disc you own, and never leaves it.
.cue is preferred, with its .bin beside it; .bin, .img, .iso and
.car also work.
This build is compiled from the USA release, serial SLUS-01411. A PAL,
Japanese or Greatest Hits disc is a different program and cannot run here. The
expected data-track CRC32 is recorded in game.toml as disc_crc, and is
computed once when you choose the disc, not on every boot. To repoint it, use
FILE → CHANGE GAME DISC in the F10 menu.
Scripted and headless runs have no picker and must be told:
Yu_Gi_Oh_Forbidden_Memories_Recompiled.exe --disc "/path/to/game.cue"Also available: --memcard-dir <path>, --no-launcher.
The framework is a submodule at psxrecomp/, so clone recursively (or run
git submodule update --init --recursive if you already cloned):
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Unchiga/YuGiOhForbiddenMemoriesRecomp.gitgenerate produces both the recompiled BIOS and the game's C — the
framework ships bios/openbios.bin but not its recompiled form, so a fresh
clone has no BIOS backend until this runs:
python3 psxrecomp/psxrecomp_cli.py generate \
--config game.toml --project-root . --disc /path/to/your.cue
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --target psx-runtime(The setup host does exactly this for you — see First run.)
generated/ and the baked sprite and font sources come from your disc; they
are gitignored and must not be published — see NOTICE. The art is
baked at build time, so CMake must know where your disc is: running generate
first is enough. Failing that it tries -DYGOFM_DISC=<path>, the disc this
build directory already verified, then the one recorded beside the executable,
and stops with a message rather than shipping a runtime with no art.
Builds and runs natively on Apple Silicon with the commands above — no flags of
its own. Prerequisites are the Xcode Command Line Tools plus
brew install cmake ninja pkg-config sdl3.
Build with -j4 rather than the default on an 8 GB machine: the generated C
includes shards of 400k+ lines, and four concurrent clang instances is where
this stops being memory-bound. Vulkan compiles as a software stub unless the
SDK is installed; the OpenGL renderer runs over Metal at full speed regardless.
Add -DPSX_DEBUG_TOOLS=ON for a debug build with the TCP inspection server on
127.0.0.1:4370.
cmake -S psxrecomp/recompiler -B build-recompiler -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build-recompiler --target psxrecomp-game psxrecomp-bios
cmake -S . -B build-setup -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DPSXRECOMP_FORCE_SETUP_HOST=ON
cmake --build build-setup --target psx-runtime
scripts/package_setup_release.sh build-setup <artifact-tag>Writes dist/ygofm-<version>-<tag>.zip. Needs objdump on PATH so bundled
MinGW DLLs can be resolved, and the build directory must be a setup host
build (PSXRECOMP_FORCE_SETUP_HOST=ON), not the game.
psxrecomp/ is pinned to the
ygofm branch of a fork of
PSXRecomp, because this project needs
framework work not upstream yet: the disc-identity gate, registration APIs so a
title owns its own debug commands and guest-space overlays, per-vblank game and
SDL-event hooks (how the Drop Table Manager owns its second window), and a
launcher-less setup host. All additive and intended for upstream; the branch
exists so this repository builds today.
Symbols: symbols.toml → python3 tools/sync_symbols.py → psx_symbols.h
(PSX_FN_*). See psxrecomp/docs/SYMBOLS.md.
PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — see LICENSE. Noncommercial use only, and the licence cannot be sublicensed or swapped for a permissive one, because the framework it builds on is offered on the same terms (Copyright © 2026 Matthew Stan).
That covers this project and the framework. It grants nothing in respect of the game, which is Konami's — use only a disc image you obtained legally.
Read NOTICE before redistributing anything — particularly before sharing a compiled build, which is not the same as sharing this repository.
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