Five Dungeon Master games. One engine. Your original data.

Firestaff is a source-faithful reimplementation of every major Dungeon Master game engine, built from scratch in portable C for macOS, Windows, Linux and Steam Deck. It plays your legally owned game files on modern hardware with pixel-perfect Original rendering or selectable Custom presentation at resolutions from 640×400 up to 4K.

Only real runtime captures appear here — no mock-ups or placeholder art.

Original	Custom
	Coming soon

Source-faithful, not guesswork. Every gameplay-critical path is anchored to the best available reference source code. DM1 and CSB are locked against ReDMCSB. DM2 is locked against skproject. Nexus and Theron's Quest are verified through Saturn SH-2 disassembly and PC Engine CD analysis respectively. The codebase cites original source files and function names in comments so you can trace any behavior back to its reference.

Your data, verified. Firestaff scans your game files by cryptographic hash, not by filename. Put files anywhere — loose, in ZIPs, in ISO/BIN disc images — and the scanner finds them. 165+ verified hashes cover original assets across all five games. Games with missing required data cannot launch; there is no guessing or silent fallback.

Two ways to play. Every game offers pixel-perfect Original rendering at the native resolution and source palette, plus Custom presentation modes with filtered, upscaled and modern targets up to 3840×2160. Custom always runs on top of the same source-locked engine — it never bypasses collision, timing, combat or inventory logic.

Preservation-grade documentation. 960+ parity-evidence documents, 3,670+ automated tests, and a comprehensive wiki covering file formats, hardware architecture, and source-reference boundaries for all five games.

1. Download from GitHub Releases.
2. Run once so the data directory is created.
3. Drop your game files anywhere under the data directory.
4. Launch. The scanner finds your data and shows which games are ready.

Suggested layout:

~/.firestaff/data/
  dm1/
  csb/
  dm2/
  nexus/
  theron/

Playable and source-locked against ReDMCSB. Viewport rendering, combat, spells, movement, inventory, Hall of Champions, save/load, title sequence, entrance animation, music, and HUD are all verified. The strongest runtime target.

Full engine coverage: DSA opcode interpreter, monster and world execution, startup presentation, entrance and credits sequences, HUD and champion panels, viewport geometry, thing and sensor runtime, combat and movement systems, original save format and Utility Disk support. End-to-end playability hardening is active.

Source-locked against skproject. GDAT renderer, material families, creature renderer, map and record runtime, save interop, menu and title, party and inventory, spells, creature AI and combat, world scripts, and outdoor scenes are all complete. Active work focuses on remaining real-data passes.

Saturn DGN geometry, RLOWFIX.BIN resource archive, ITEM.IBS item definitions, PRS3 sprite compression, SAL/MAP sound banks, and SDDRVS.TSK sound driver are all parsed and verified. SH-2 disassembly has proven VDP1/VDP2 register initialization, SCSP sound communication, FONT012 text rendering, and 19 original IWA source module names extracted from the binary.

JP and US Track 02 provenance is hash-verified. CD record chain, 218-entry asset manifest, startup level envelope, and SRM save boundary are proven. Parser, world state, viewport, mechanics, save/load, and shop-table guards have focused test coverage.

firestaff [options]
  --game <id>           Pre-select dm1, csb, dm2, nexus or theron
  --scale-mode <n>      1=Original, 2=Custom enhanced, 3=Custom modern
  --data-dir <path>     Game-data root directory
  --scan-data           Scan and report found/missing game files
  --fullscreen          Run fullscreen
  --no-vsync            Disable vertical sync
  --fps                 Show FPS counter
  --duration <ms>       Run for a fixed duration (-1 = run until exit)
  --width <px>          Window width
  --height <px>         Window height
  --script <cmds>       Comma-separated input script
  --version             Print version and exit
  --help, -h            Print help

Examples:

firestaff --scan-data
firestaff --game dm1 --scale-mode 1
firestaff --data-dir ~/Games/DM --fullscreen

Requirements: CMake 3.20+, a C11 compiler, SDL3, Ninja.

brew install sdl3          # macOS
git clone https://github.com/yeager/firestaff.git
cd firestaff
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=cc -G Ninja
ninja -C build
./build/firestaff --help

Run the test suite:

ctest --test-dir build -j4 --output-on-failure

Some tests require original game data to pass.

Launcher UI (M12)
  └─ Game engine, render loop, input and audio (M11)
       └─ Data layer, dungeon state, combat and timeline (M10)
            └─ Original game files supplied by the player

• ReDMCSB — reconstructed C source for DM1 and CSB (PC 3.4)
• CSBWin — Chaos Strikes Back reimplementation
• skproject — reconstructed C source for DM2
• Greatstone — dungeon maps, data notes, graphics atlas
• DMWeb — community documentation, file format specs, tools

The launcher supports 19 languages via gettext PO files: English, Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish.

The game-text pipeline includes 28 hand-drawn Latin Extended-A glyphs and a TTF font cache with system-font fallback for Cyrillic, Greek, CJK and Hangul.

The Firestaff Wiki has detailed documentation for users, developers and preservationists:

• Installation, controls, savegames, Steam Deck setup
• Game guides for all five titles
• File format specifications for every supported game
• Technical references and source-lock architecture
• Deep internals: DM1 PC34, CSB DSA, DM2 GDAT, Nexus DGN/PRS3/Saturn hardware, Theron's Quest Track 02
• Preservation worklists for ReDMCSB, CSBWin and skproject

Firestaff is a clean-room engine reimplementation. You need original game files that you legally own. No copyrighted game data is included.

Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back and Dungeon Master II are trademarks of FTL Games. DM Nexus is a trademark of Victor Interactive Software. Theron's Quest is a trademark of Working Designs / Victor Interactive Software.

MIT. See LICENSE.