Vita developer Rinnegatamante has released a port of RigelEngine for the PS Vita, a rewrite of the Duke Nukem 2 game with multiple Quality-Of-Life improvements and mod support.

What is RigelEngine for PS Vita?

Rigelengine is a rewrite of Duke Nukem2, and this is a PS Vita port of this engine. From the original project’s readme:

This project is a re-implementation of the game Duke Nukem II, originally released by Apogee Software in 1993 for MS-DOS. RigelEngine works as a drop-in replacement for the original executable: It reads the game’s data files and plays just like the original, but runs natively on modern operating systems and is written in modern C++ code with a completely new architecture under the hood. On top of that, it offers many modern enhancements, including:

• wide-screen mode
• smooth scrolling & movement mode with increased frame rate
• quick saving
• improved game controller support
• extended modding features

There was never any source code released for the original game, so this project is based on reverse engineering. Disassembly from the original executable served as basis for writing new code from scratch, while video captures from DosBox were used for frame-by-frame verification. See [the] blog post to learn more about the process. See Duke2Reconstructed for what the original code might have looked like.

Try the web version! (compiled to wasm via Emscripten)

Read the F.A.Q.

Showcase video (outdated):

Download RigelEngine (Duke Nukem 2) for PS Vita

You will need a hacked PS Vita in order to run this homebrew game. The easiest way to install Vita Homebrew is to get an “appstore” homebrew such as VitaDB Downloader. Alternatively, you can Download the VPK from the VitaDB page here.

Please note that by default, the game only includes the shareware version of the game, which lets you play episode 1 out of 4 of Duke Nukem 2. If you own a legit copy of the full game, you can put its files in ux0:data/rigel.

Note from the dev:

In order to use this homebrew, you’ll need libshacccg.suprx. If you didn’t already extract it, here you can find a guide on how to do so: https://cimmerian.gitbook.io/vita-troubleshooting-guide/shader-compiler/extract-libshacccg.suprx

Source: VitaDB