More on Unreal Championship

If you've read my last update on Unreal Championship, you'll have a good understanding by now what the situation is. If not, you might want to read that first :)

So, now what's going on? So far, this is the most interesting situation I've come across when working on this emulator. The solution to it might be even more interesting (or annoying). I'm not really sure which would be the best way to go from here, but I do have two ideas for this scenario (to handle the problem with the xbe trying to re-launch itself). When XLaunchNewImage is called (and when the .xbe being called is itself) and the LaunchData parameter is saved, we can either:

1. Trigger some sort of "restart" process inside the CxbxKrnl so everything except the necessary things are in the initial state at which the game was started. Then jump right back to the game's main entry point and continue as normal. Optionally "Persist" the display until D3DDevice::Present is called.

2. Save the contents of pLaunchData to a file in the same directory of the game (it's size will always be 3KB). Then load the file and restore certain states the next time Cxbx is running the same game. This will require you to restart Cxbx each time you want to go in-game.

Remember, I said I'm looking for the "best" way to handle this, not the most "ideal". I know everyone would rather have me do number 1, but so far I've only had time to try number 2. This is what happened...

Rats! To a certain extent, #2 does work, but it does have one small problem. The controller needs to be re-initialized so that the game will recognize that it's still there. This will require a bit of hacking. So far, it appears that everything else worked fine. All the files required to load the map, etc. were loaded without problems. But so far, it looks like #1 is harder to implement and #2 requires more extensive hacking. Maybe a simple jump could fix everything (for #1)! Since I'll be busy tonight and all day tomorrow, there's no telling when I can actually try it. Hopefully Caustik can jump back in sometime and give a few suggestions, but unfortunately, it appears that I'm the only one on the Cxbx team that has this game.

I'd really like to get more in-depth on this, but atm I have much work to do IRL so just stay tuned and I'll see what I can do. There's a lot that can be done with this game (once it works), but you'll just have to see if/when that happens :)

Shogun.