Install & Prepare guide

Before you start

MKW Recomp builds a native executable on your own computer from your own copy of Mario Kart World. Make sure you have:

• Your own decrypted Mario Kart World version 1.0.0 folder containing two subdirectories: exefs/ and romfs/. (This site does not provide game dumps, keys or dumping instructions.)
• At least 30 GB of free disk space on an SSD for generated C sources, object files (setup-work/obj) and translated SPIR-V shaders.
• An active internet connection during the very first Prepare run so the setup tool can fetch NVIDIA’s nvdisasm and ptxas binaries (84 MB on Linux, 126 MB on Windows, pinned by SHA-256) to decode SM86 shader instructions.

Windows 10/11 setup steps

1. Download mkw-recomp-0.1.8-windows-x64.zip from Download & SHA-256 and verify its hash.
2. Extract the ZIP into a normal writable path without special restrictions, such as C:\Games\mkw-recomp (avoid C:\Program Files). Paths with spaces were fixed in v0.1.5 (#29).
3. Launch mkw.exe to open the start screen.
4. Click Game files, browse to the folder holding your exefs/ and romfs/ directories, and click Prepare.
5. Wait for code generation, C compilation (360 translation units via bundled zig 0.17.1), offline translation of all 11,561 shaders (~30 minutes total on a mid-range Windows PC in v0.1.8, down from 45 minutes in v0.1.7), and the 1-minute Vulkan pipeline warm-up.
6. Press Play. Press F1 at any time to toggle the Dear ImGui settings bar or F10 for the frame-time / FPS overlay.

Linux AppImage setup steps

1. Download mkw-recomp-0.1.8-x86_64.AppImage (built against Steam Runtime 3 “sniper”, glibc 2.31+: Debian 11, Ubuntu 20.04, Fedora, Arch, CachyOS and SteamOS).
2. Make it executable and launch it:

   chmod +x mkw-recomp-0.1.8-x86_64.AppImage
   ./mkw-recomp-0.1.8-x86_64.AppImage

3. Open Game files, select your 1.0.0 dump directory, and click Prepare. On a Ryzen 5 7535HS (Radeon 660M, Mesa RADV), v0.1.8 finishes the entire setup in roughly 15.5 minutes.
4. All compiled outputs (mkwgame.so, spirv/, setup-work/obj) and logs live inside ~/.local/share/mkw-recomp.

Updating to a newer release

Starting in v0.1.5, the start screen checks GitHub Releases automatically and displays an Update to vX button. Clicking it downloads the new package, verifies its checksum, swaps the program, and reruns only the Prepare stages that changed. Because v0.1.8 keeps compiled objects inside setup-work/obj, future code updates re-link in seconds instead of 8–12 minutes. You can disable automatic checks under Settings > Menu > Check for updates.

Building from source (developers)

Developers on Linux with uv, clang, lld, ninja, SDL3, Opus, libvpx, zstd, xxHash, Vulkan headers and VMA 3.4.0 can place their dump in game/exefs and game/romfs (or export MKW_GAME=/path/to/dump) and run:

uv run python recomp/gen.py --exefs game/exefs --out build/generated --jobs 8 --patches recomp/patches-mkw.txt
uv run tools/shaders/extract.py && uv run tools/shaders/translate.py
uv run tools/build/build.py   # add --target windows to cross-compile mkw.exe via llvm-mingw
build/mkw