Panzer Dragoon ORTA: Some progress...

Since Cxbx's activity is rather low these days, I think starting a blog dedicated to my work on Cxbx would be a good idea so that everyone knows it's not dead yet. Right now, I'm the only one who has the time to work on it (I don't have much, still).

The purpose of this blog is to keep you all up-to-date on what's going on with my Cxbx branch. This is NOT a help line. If you need help, click here to be taken to the Cxbx official forum (and read the rules before posting). DO NOT ask me for roms, ISOs, betas or release dates! Requests of this nature will be ignored!

Anyway, last night I got to work on Cxbx for a while (I really had nothing else to do). I was originally trying to fix some problems with Taz: Wanted and Zapper. These two games use the same engine and share the same problems/bugs so far, so fixing one will fix the other! Instead of finding a solution for those games, I ended up fixing Panzer Dragoon ORTA (XDK 4928) unexpectedly! I was scrolling through some output generated by IDA and noticed some code referenced ObReferenceObjectByHandle. After seeing that, the first thing that came to my mind was, "Forget it, this is my chance to fix Panzer!", lol! Turns out it was just a missing call to GetExitCodeThread, which hasn't changed since 3911, so all I had to do was copy that over to 4627 and it worked... after adding some more missing functions below (verified for all XDKs within the range listed):

RtlDestroyHeap (4627-4928) (Others?)
CDirectSoundVoice::SetAllParameters (4627 - 4928)
CDirectSoundBuffer::SetAllParameters (4627 - 4928)
IDirectSoundBuffer8_SetAllParameters (4627 - 4928)
D3D::SetFence (4627 - 4928) (*)
IDirect3DDevice8_InsertFence (4627 - 4928) (*)
D3D::CDevice::KickOff (4627 - 4928)

(*) These weren't required for Panzer.

Now, for the good news and bad news:

Good:

• You can get passed the menus and initial dialog.
• Audio output is almost perfect and stutter free. Background music works, but a few sound effects are missing.
• No more crashes due to missing APIs!

Bad:

• So far, it appears that 3D is not rendering (can't confirm this yet). If this is true, it's more than likely a problem in the push buffer simulation (then it's Caustik's problem).
  
• Even though Panzer is no longer bound to the menu stages, you can't exactly "Play" it either. So right now I'm going to set Panzer's status to "Ingame" with an asterisk (*).
• Either way, you will get the dreaded dirty disc error message again prior to going ingame. We might be able to copy some of Panzer's files directly to it's folder in the emulated Z: drive. This is what I had to do for Myst III.

So, it's nothing too major, but in general I'm picking up where Caustik and KingOfC left off. The solution to fixing Panzer Dragoon ORTA might be simple, but I could be wrong. Stay tuned, and I'll see what I can do.

Shogun.