u/SputnikKaputnik

Some of you will remember Pearl (2016): a girl and her dad on the road in their old hatchback, years of their lives told entirely from the passenger seat, carried by a song they share. Patrick Osborne directed it for Google Spotlight Stories. It was the first VR film ever nominated for an Oscar and won an Emmy for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Storytelling.

I watched it again recently and it got me just like the first time. Then it hit me: its VR version only runs on a Windows PC with SteamVR, on a 2016 engine nobody maintains anymore. Most people today own a standalone headset. One day this film simply won't start anymore.

So I started Project Oyster: a preservation port, not a remake. Pearl's own story scripts, animation, shaders, lighting and music run unchanged in a new engine, natively on Quest 3 (OpenXR, 72 Hz, sharper than the original). Story transitions were checked frame by frame against captures of the original.

It's not a pirated copy. No part of Pearl is included. You bring your own copy from Steam (it's free). A Windows installer finds it, verifies it and copies it to your Quest over USB (developer mode needed).

Two optional extras, both easy to turn off:

• smoothly interpolated animation (A/X on the controller; the default is the original stepped keys)
• eye height +30 cm: in the original you sit low in the seat, this puts you at eye level with Dad (thumbstick)

GitHub (MIT, installer in the release): https://github.com/SputnikKaputtnik/pearl-oyster

Heads-up: the Steam page is region-locked in some countries (e.g. Germany). With a US VPN it shows up and the download is still free.

Full disclosure: I built this with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant (Claude). Every result was checked against the original, and I watched the whole film in the headset, start to credits.

If Pearl ever meant something to you: it's waiting in the passenger seat again. 🚗 And if you never experienced it: time to hit the road with Sara and her dad!

Interstate '82 only ever accepted four 4:3/5:4 resolutions, and the GOG version has a bunch of problems on current Windows. I spent a while taking it apart and packaged the fixes as a small open-source patch:

**What it does**

- Adds **1920x1080 and 3840x2160** to the game's own Graphics options. It's real Hor+: the view extends sideways, nothing is stretched, and the HUD moves to the screen edges and scales with the resolution.

- Fixes the **hang at startup** on current Windows 11 (caused by GOG's own winmm.dll), the crash when a mission loads, and a crash when leaving or restarting a mission on multi-monitor setups.

- Fixes the **dead keyboard** in missions and the key-binding screen ("Control X does not exist").

- Gets the **CD soundtrack** playing again. On many systems it's silent, where it does play the sound effects drop out, and GOG's version plays the same track in every mission. Now every mission gets its own track, next to the effects.

- Borderless fullscreen through DDrawCompat, no DxWnd or launcher.

- Optional: a tool that raises the **draw distance** 3x, so the fog wall is gone. That's what gives the screenshot its view.

**Install:** download three files from the latest release, add ddraw.dll from DDrawCompat, drop all four into the game folder and confirm replacing winmm.dll. That's it.

- Download and source (MIT): https://github.com/SputnikKaputtnik/interstate82-widescreen-4k-fix

- More screenshots: https://sputnikkaputtnik.github.io/interstate82-widescreen-4k-fix/

- Also documented on PCGamingWiki.

Tested on Windows 11 with an RTX 4070 Ti (around 240 FPS at 1080p, 100 FPS at 4K). No game files included. Reports from AMD/Intel GPUs or Windows 10 are very welcome.

**AI transparency: I used Claude Opus 5.5 for the coding work. I did lots of testing and back and forth with the AI though.**