King's Field Enhanced

A Windows PC version of the original King's Field (Japan, 1994, SLPS-00017), playable in English with the fan translation or in the original Japanese (switchable in game), and with optional modern improvements: widescreen, high resolutions, high frame rates, mouse look, dynamic lighting, an automap, quick saves, an in-game settings overlay and Lua mods.

It is built on sushi-shi's source port of the game, which runs the original game logic natively. The settings menus, the live-reloading mod system and the console are inspired by Verdite2, Voicedrew11's excellent PC port of the US King's Field. Nothing from the game is included here: you need your own copy of the disc.

Pre-release. The first floor has been played through for several hours; later floors, the ending and some edge cases are less tested. Please report problems in the issue tracker, with kf.log attached (see Files below).

What you need

• Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) and a GPU with OpenGL support.
• A disc image of King's Field (Japan) SLPS-00017 that you dumped yourself, either of:
  • The original Japanese disc. On the first launch the game offers to add the English translation by downloading the translator's own patch (see Languages), so you can play in both.
  • A disc with the English translation patch already applied (v1.0, with or without the save-bug fix).
  • Accepted formats: .cue + .bin (single track, MODE2/2352) or .iso.

Playing

1. Download the latest zip from Releases and unzip it anywhere.
2. Run kings-field.exe. On the first launch it asks for your disc image and copies the game files into a data folder beside the exe. This takes a few seconds and happens only once; the image itself is not changed.
   • Instead of picking the image, you can drop your .cue (or .iso) onto kings-field.exe, or put it in the same folder before the first launch.
   • With the Japanese disc, it then offers to add English (see below).
3. Press F1 at any time for settings. The game keeps running while the overlay is open.

To use a different disc image later, delete the data folder and launch again. Versions before 0.1.0-pre.3 kept the files directly in data; they are moved into data\en (or data\ja) automatically.

Languages

The game can run in English (John Osborne's fan translation v1.0) or the original Japanese, and switch between them at any time: in the game's own Options menu (new Language row) or in F1 > Settings > Language. Menus and item names change at once; dialogue and signs follow as they are next shown. Saves work in both.

Each language needs its own game files, kept in data\en and data\ja:

• English from a Japanese disc: nothing translated ships with this project. The game downloads the translator's original release (Kings_Field_Jap_to_Eng_v1.0.rar, about 6 MB) from the Internet Archive's copy of his site, checks it, applies it to your Japanese files and verifies the result against the known English files. If you already have the .rar (or the .ppf inside it), choose it instead, or drop it onto kings-field.exe.
• Japanese when you only have a patched disc: add your original Japanese disc image in F1 > Settings > Language (or drop it onto kings-field.exe). A patched disc can't be turned back into Japanese.

Controls

Action	Keyboard / mouse
Move / strafe	W A S D
Look	Mouse (click the window to capture it), Page Up / Page Down
Turn	Left / Right arrows
Run	Shift (hold, or toggle in Settings > Controls)
Attack	Space, left mouse button
Magic	Q, right mouse button
Interact / confirm	E, Enter
Menu	Tab (Tab or Backspace backs out)
Pause	P, Escape
Full map	M
Quick save / quick load	F2 / F4 (F4 also works on the title screen)
Settings overlay	F1
Fullscreen	F11, Alt+Enter

Controllers are supported (left stick moves, click it to run).

Features

Everything below can be switched off in the F1 settings to get closer to the original PlayStation presentation.

Display

• Widescreen (16:9, 16:10, 21:9 or window-shaped) and native-resolution rendering (for example 2560x1440), or whole multiples of 320x240.
• Frame smoothing up to your monitor's refresh rate (game speed unchanged).
• Stable polygons and perspective-correct textures ("Polygon wiggle" restores the PS1 look), smooth colour without 15-bit banding, optional texture filtering, anti-aliasing (FXAA or 4x/9x supersampling), optional depth buffer.

Lighting

• Torches and fire or lightning spells light nearby surfaces, with flicker; walls block the light. Flame glow, torch shadows and ambient occlusion. Shadows only remove added light, so nothing is darker than in the original.

Gameplay and quality of life

• Mouse look with a wider up/down range (adjustable, original is about 17 degrees).
• Run key with adjustable speed.
• Equipment stats beside the item picture in menus and shops, and on the equip screens the current totals next to the totals with the highlighted item (green if better, red if worse).
• Item descriptions under the item picture: what consumables heal or cure, what keys and quest items are for, and equipment effects the stats do not show (regeneration, curses, sword magic, immunities). Effects are taken from the game's own rules and data, so they match what actually happens.
• Quick save and load (F2/F4) using the game's own save format, kept separate from the three normal save slots.
• Automap: a north-up minimap and a full floor map (M), which pauses the game while open (or not, if you prefer to walk with it open). Fog of war shows only what you have seen (or turn it off); carrying the Keeper's or Magician's Map reveals the whole floor. Doors, warps (labelled with their floor), save points, fountains and people are marked once seen. Chasms (pits and trenches where a fall is fatal) are hatched grey, and the bridges the Harp raises are teal: an outline while lowered, solid while up. Items, chests and enemies can be shown too, as can the key each locked door or chest needs; those are off by default because they are cheats. On the full map, scroll to zoom, drag to move and point at a marker to see what it is (a chest lists its contents).
• English or Japanese, switchable during play (see Languages).
• Optional fixes for bugs in the original game (Settings > Gameplay, on by default): enemies that bump a ceiling mid-jump fall back down, and a stereo panning adjustment the original never applied.

Overlay and mods

• F1 overlay with settings, a mod manager and a console showing the game's log.
• Lua mods with live reload: edit a mod while the game runs and it reloads instantly. Two example mods (a stat panel and a quick-heal cheat) are included, switched off; enable them in F1 > Mods. See docs/MODDING.md.

Files

Everything the game writes goes to %APPDATA%\KingsField\SLPS00017:

File	Contents
slot1.kfs ... slot3.kfs	The game's save slots
quicksave.kfs (+ .bak)	Quick save and the one before it
*.kfs.map	Explored map areas for each save
settings.json	Settings, including each mod's options
mods\	Installed mods
kf.log	Log of the last session (attach it to bug reports)

Building from source

Windows build:

• llvm-mingw (the ucrt-x86_64 package), with its bin folder on PATH.
• Python 3 (the build step that can embed a translation delta, as upstream).
• CMake 3.25 or newer and Ninja.

cmake --preset windows
cmake --build --preset windows

SDL3 is downloaded automatically on the first configure. The result is build/windows/kings-field.exe with SDL3.dll beside it. Run it with no arguments for the first-launch setup above, or pass --data DIRECTORY for an already extracted disc (--data-ja and --data-en give one of each language; --language ja|en picks the starting one; --english-patch FILE|download builds English into data\en beside the exe). scripts/package-windows.ps1 builds the release zip.

Linux and browser builds are unchanged from upstream; see docs/UPSTREAM-README.md.

Credits

• sushi-shi/kings-field-decomp: the decompilation and source port this project is built on (CC0). All of the game logic, the original renderer and audio code, the disc extractor and the save system come from it, as do the approach to building English from the translator's patch (with his table of the disc's file layout), the language switch and several bug fixes.
• Verdite2 by Voicedrew11 (MIT): the PC port of the US King's Field. Its in-game menus, live-reloading Lua mod system and console window inspired the F1 overlay, the mod system and the console here, and its map inspired the automap. The run key and quick save follow the Verdite2 mods of the same names.
• John Osborne (weissvulf / HwitVlf): the English translation of King's Field (v1.0, 2006) and its save-bug fix. This project reads the translated text from your patched disc, or applies his original patch to your Japanese disc; the translation itself is not redistributed.
• Dear ImGui (MIT), Lua (MIT), cJSON (MIT), SDL3 (zlib) and the Khronos OpenGL ES headers (MIT).
• FromSoftware, who made King's Field. This is an unofficial fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by FromSoftware or Sony.

License

The code in this repository is released under CC0, like the port it is based on. Third-party code in vendor/ keeps its own license; see the license file in each folder. King's Field and its assets belong to FromSoftware and are not included.