Having done a lot of programming for a number of years, I can say that you actually lose the ability to communicate with people after you've done it for a while." -- Scott Adams
The last week has given us some nice updates in the X-Box emulation scene. First, blueshogun96 has updated his branch of the CXBX source. He posted this over at General-Emu :
finally got a chance to upload my branch to the SVN yesterday. The update includes the changes I've added over the past year. I never had a chance to do this until now. Beware that builds from this branch are still beta and hence not stable enough for a release of any kind. Use them at your own discression.Now for the changes:
Increased support for SDK 4627 and all of it's "relatives"
A minor increase in compatibility for commercial games.
Started support for DirectSound3D (Highly unstable, not yet fully functional and can cause crashes). Must be enabled in the source prior to compiling.
Support for many new texture formats.
Fixed some issues with apps that use DirectMusic. Timing is still inaccurate!
Added multiple new kernel functions.
Fixed some SDK 4721 and 4928 "oddities" with certain APIs
Possibly more things I can't remember.
Some other things that need to be done:
EmuIDirect3DDevice8_GetProjectionViewportMatrix was added, but needs verification.
The hex values of some D3DFMTs can change from one SDK to the next. Easy to add, but I always forget
Add support for multiple thread notifications. This will fix one problem with Blood Wake.
Add a more SDK 5558 API support so that BattleStar Gakactica NTSC version.
The shader parsing code really needs to be updated.
Incomplete NtCreateFile emulation code is STILL giving us major problems (false dirty disc errors)!
Also, shogun_nihon has noticed that a new branch in the CXBX source has appeared. This branch is maintained by Nisse (which reminds me that I should set both of them with emu author stars :o ). Most noticeable changes is that Futurama is now playable as you can see in these screenshots.
» You can find blueshogun96's SVN here
» And Nisse's branch is located here
Even though it's now roughly 6 years old, emulation of the x-box console is still far from working. Now another team decided to give this tough project a try and founded the project Dxbx. Based on the C code of Cxbx, the team attempts to develop this emulator completly in Delphi!
Patrickvl, one of the team members, has recently posted a status update about where the emulator currently stands over in this thread - take a look:
Rob has already made a signature file for all XAPI functions, and
concluded that it's possible to detect multiple XDK versions with a
single set of XAPI signatures.That great news actually, because it saves us from building detection
per version, and also enables us make a small logging-patch for _all_
XAPI's. This will give us detailed insight in the XAPI-calling-patterns
of every game we can get our hands on!
Robert also found out why some games can't be converted to an EXE : I'd
seems that the Xbox accepts more sections in an executable than Windows
XP - one game had 137 sections, which XP refused to MapAndLoad (...)
Me, I'm still busy figuring out how all the 387 Kernel API's should
look, because it's important that the calling convention, the number of
arguments, their types and type of return value (if any) matches the
Xbox version exactly (one mistake and the stack could become
corrupted). It's a mind-numbingly boring job, and even more depressing
is the realization that we'll have to do the same thing for all XAPI's
that we must patch (and the most depressing part is, that there's about
twenty times as many XAPI's then there are Kernel API's).
The team is currently looking for people who help translating the code, finding method signatures or with general coding - if this sounds like you, don't hesitate to check out the Dxbx forum to apply.
Caustik has updated his blog earlier to let everyone know that a new developper named Martin has been playing around with the CXBX source. And let me tell you that it's some impressive progress! Here's exactly what Caustik said on his blog:
There was some amount of activity in a private branch in the Cxbx project recently..
I have been talking to a developer, Martin, who has spent some of his extra time fiddling with Cxbx. He was able to get some teaser screenshots from Battlestar Galactica. The game displays the menu, and even some in-game. I won’t get into too many details, but here are a couple screenshots.
I have not started to work on Cxbx on a regular basis — but I think this progress is very motivating, and it is tempting me to boot back up my development setup and take another look after a very long absence.
Many thanks to Martin for the contributions and for allowing me to post about his progress. Cheers.
Let's hope to hear more from CXBX in the future now that Caustik is no longer alone.
Even though we rarely reported about this kind of news so far,
I was simply too impressed to ignore this great piece of news: Over in
this thread,
Carcharius announced the immediate release of his X-Box port of Quake 3,
which, after a first test, seems to be running absolutely smooth! Here's
a snipset from the release notes:
So what does it do?
As it stands now it will let you play the single player game
portion of Quake 3: Arena. You should also be able to play on a
network and over the internet, against other Xbox players as well
as people running Quake 3 for the pc. For internet play you will
require a valid CD key from the pc version of Quake 3.
It also has the ability to load and run some of the many mods
available for Quake 3.
As usual with these X-Box releases,
there is no direct link available for legal reason - you can find
it if you dig a bit through the IRC network however. Huge thanks to Centric
for the news!
A bit late but better late than never ;) Over in this thread on our forums, there's a nice progress update about the XBOX emulator CXBX, which just recently started running games at real good speeds. But read for yourself:
yeah, halo is making good progress. there are issues (probably simple swizzling problems) with textures; but other than that, halo is able to boot up very fast so it is mostly minor fixes to get the menu working really nicely. then i'll get it in-game and see what new fun there is to fix.
halo likes to modify it's textures at unusual times, which had me scratching my head until last night when I put in a fix and suddenly everything started showing textures.
Great news indeed. You can check out the CXBX homepage or our forums for more informations.
After it has been very silent around the XBox emulator CXBX as of late, there're now some breaking news over at the official site: Turok is *completly* playable by now and only some minor graphical glitches are left. Caustik also reports, that on a P4 with 2.8 Ghz and a GeForce FX 5600, Turok runs *very* fast, so speed doesn't seem to be an issue either. As a proof, the CXBX team also uploaded a nice movie, which gives you an idea of the fantastic speed of the game:
These screenshots are taken on my GeForce FX 5600 (2.8 ghz P4). Turok is completely playable and suffers from only mild glitches like missing polygons and water effects. The gameplay is very smooth, frames per second are real-time. It is even possible to overclock Cxbx and play at 4x+ speed without choking the system.
The source is available on the CXBX Sourceforge page. Please notice that discussions about how to compile it are not allowed in the official message board; if you don't know how to compile it, you'll better wait for the final and stable build.
Sorry for my absence during the past few days, I've rather been active behind the scenes fixing tons of bugs (more about that later). Now let's catch up on some news: The guys over at X-Box scene posted an interview with caustik, author of CXBX (which has progressed quite fast as of late!). Take a look at this snipset from the interview:
Xbox-Scene: So, what's the current status of CXBX? From the last public release we saw already some intro movies playing, and even some homebrew games booting up ... what's the status of the latest internal release you have?
Caustik: Cxbx was put on the backburner for quite some time, but recently I have sparked it back up and I try to work on it 3-4 times a week for at least an hour. The 4627 XDK is progressing very steadily, and things are looking good. You can now navigate the menu in Turok, and watch the pre-game movie after clicking Begin Game. This means two full movies are working in Turok, and we're very close to retail 3d rendering.
» Check out the complete interview here. » Thanks to JC_Denton2002 for the notice!
Over in this thread, caustik posted that wireframe is now working just fine in Turok Evolution - meaning that we should start to see some impressive things from CXBX soon ;) Take a look:
Hehe..more turok screenshots. Wireframe shows that the index buffers are being rendered correctly, just need vertex shaders. Everything runs very very smooth..
I should also mention that this only works with my NVidia card, the ATI radeon pushes all the vertices in the upper left corner. This is almost definately going to be fixed when some of kingofc's work is integrated.
Keep in mind that these things are actually moving. Speed is supposed to be fine as well, even when "real" graphics are going to show up! You can find more infos about the progress and these shots in this thread.
More progress in the x-box emulation section: Caustik let us know over in this thread, that he was able to get further into Turok: Some in-game screenshots seem to display now. Here's what caustik posted :
Turok now runs "In-Game" - PushBuffers are not emulated yet, so the result is a lack of 3-D graphics. Occasionally, you can see glitches where Dinosaurs should be, and you can tell when you're being killed by one. You can hear sounds, and you can move around with the controls. Framerate is real-time, but this will obviously be affected once push buffers are implemented.
I am researching push buffers, reverse engineering the Nvidia GPU in order to do so. Progress on this is happening very quickly, but I am not quite in the implementation stage. Kingofc and Sop Skrutt are also working on other areas of the emulator.
Great to see X-Box emulation advancing as well ! Check out the thread here to leave your comments.
Over in this thread, there are several screenshots from shadow_tj which show an impressive progress going on with the X-Box emulator CXBX. The screenshots show the self running in-game demo from Rayman. Though we're not 100% sure yet if this is a movie or actually the game engine displaying the graphics, the shots are very nice to look at - see for yourself:
Great work caustik and KingofC! For more CXBX screenshots, make sure to check out our CXBX section!
Well, seems all other members are too busy right now to post news, so let's quickly catch up a bit, even though I myself do lack time as well.
After months of silence, there's been an update again on the official CXBX homepage again to inform everyone about the current status of this X-Box emu:
Sorry it has been so long since a site update. Cxbx is not halted, but it is definately a lower priority than I would like it to be. Progress is happening, but there are alot of other things going on and I have not been able to work on it very much. It is very difficult to find developers who can contribute to the front lines of Cxbx, as there is a very steep learning curve.
On another note, I am in the process of planning my holiday vacation. If anybody in the Las Vegas, San Diego, or Los Angeles areas knows of something really cool going down between Dec 26th and Jan 4th, shoot me an email :)
Let's hope caustik enjoys his holidays and that he might find more time in 2004 :)
CKEmu just informed me on IRC that over at the CXBX homepage, a new version of this VERY promising X-box emulator appeared. This release is now able to start running Halo, though no screens appear yet - but still a very nice progress ! Let's take a look at the post :
I am going out of town until 09/03/03, so I decided to do a release tonight. As of about 10 minutes ago, Halo executes (it copies the cache files over, etc), but displays nothing but a black screen indefinately. It might be interesting to see how this behaves on different people's PCs. The XRay demo runs really nicely now, as well as Gamepad and Rumble.
And here's the complete list of changes coming with this version, taken from the changelog :
Halo executes (no graphics yet)
Overlays simulated on PCs that do not support them in hardware.
Fixes to mesh rendering (thanks kingofc!). The "XRay" XDK demo is extremely impressive now (and runs very efficiently), as well as the Gamepad/Rumble demos.
I guess everyone of you heard about the new X-Box emulator Xeon by now. Over at the official message board, _SF_ now started a thread in which he's looking for people having problems with Xeon :
I need some people who are having problems to run the emulator in a debugger using the DirectX debug runtimes. This is so that I can see what is causing the problems with certain graphics cards.
Even more interresting is the fact that people who had problems running Xeon before are able to run the emulator with the debug version now ! If you're interrested in the details, make sure to check this thread.
Furthermore, I've updated the Xeon section a bit with some screenshots, more stuff will follow later today.
» Check out our Xeon section for the emu and more infos.
Over in this thread, caustik recently posted some more teasers from the upcoming version of CXBX, the most promising Xbox emulator to date. Take a look at the shots and his comments :
Here are a couple of development screenshots. Gamepad textures distort most likely because of unemulated alphakill, pointsprites is great but quad to tri conversion has not been optimized yet (plus i'm running this in debug mode), so the speed is ~30fps. XPRViewer from the XDK also runs great, but some XPR textures arent supported yet.
Impressive how good caustik is progressing with his project. If you're interrested in some more shots of CXBX, head over to this page.
