Sonic Unleashed gets a full fan-made PC port with Linux / Steam Deck support

By Liam Dawe - 3 Mar 2025 at 9:18 am UTC
Last updated: 3 Mar 2025 at 7:47 pm UTC

Sonic Unleashed from the Xbox 360 and PS3 era has made its way onto PC, although not by SEGA. This is a fan-made port created through the process of static recompilation.

The developer notes it offers Linux and Windows support with "numerous built-in enhancements such as high resolutions, ultrawide support, high frame rates, improved performance and modding". However, it does not include the game assets, you need to provide them yourself by owning a copy of the game.

Pictured - Sonic Unleashed on Linux

Nice to see there's even a dedicated Steam Deck / Linux section in the readme, which notes there's a Flatpak version available so it can be easily installed. For Steam Deck you'll need to be in Desktop Mode to install it.

For modding it includes a loader that supports the Hedge Mod Manager, a mod manager for Hedgehog Engine games on PC. Interestingly, there's a new version of Hedge Mod Manager in progress (Hedge Mod Manager 8 Beta) that has a Linux version too!

You can find it on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Native Linux, New Release, Open Source

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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3 comments

_Mars 12 hours ago

Link

I never thought about this before but since those recompilation projects don't require BIOS or other console software to run, would they be legally safer than emulation? For modern consoles you pretty much need proprietary code (re-implementing would be too time consuming) to run games.
There's probably still something regarding modifying code under DMCA in question but at least to me it sounds safer.

Also, nice thing with the new version of the mod manager. I heard that the developers were accommodating with patches addressing Linux issues but actually having a native version is miles better. Couldn't get mods for Sonic Frontiers working, so it might soon be time to try again.

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mrdeathjr 4 hours ago

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In my case seems works ok with mesa 25.1 (game use vulkan)

https://i.imgur.com/9RbiySe.png

https://i.imgur.com/COpwLTL.png

However game dont have audio, seems a problem linux builds

https://github.com/hedge-dev/UnleashedRecomp/issues/535

Last edited by mrdeathjr on 3 Mar 2025 at 5:40 pm UTC

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Calinou 1 hour ago

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Supporter Plus

I never thought about this before but since those recompilation projects don't require BIOS or other console software to run, would they be legally safer than emulation?

Neither the N64 nor Xbox 360 (the two consoles we have recompilation projects for) require BIOS files to emulate games.

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