Top Spin

Spent a little time on Cxbx today and realized I never did touch Top Spin (XDK 5558) after all this time.  It appears to be a rather simply coded game with nothing too complex either, but the game uses XACT and I haven't successfully emulated that yet.  Since I'm finding more and more games that actually use it, I'll eventually have to start adding support for it more.

Now, the funny thing about this game is that it has multiple .xbe files and launches a new one every time you go from intro to memu, menu to ingame, ingame to online lobby, etc. making it a bit tedious to work on.  So far, it's not as complicated as Innocent Tears (that game is ridiculous; speaking of which, I should work on it more).

So yeah, I really need to work on that XACT stuff some more and stop avoiding it every time.  Emulating it through DirectSound shouldn't be that hard and it should make sound playback easier to handle.  We'll see about that....

Oh, and merry Christmas (to those who celebrate the world's favourite pagan holiday)!  It's still Christmas where I live, so I didn't post this too late!

Shogun.

Zapper: At least it WAS working...

Finally got an opportunity to fiddle around with Cxbx on Windows 7 to verify a few things I've been curious about, thanks to my neighbour who needed me to reinstall windows for him.  The results were disappointing but at least now I know what I'm dealing with. As much as I really hate to say it, Cxbx appears to be most compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7 just appears to give me the same issues Windows XP usually does.  Panzer Dragoon ORTA still hangs and not even the demo worked like it did in XP.  The multithreading nightmare continues...

A bit of good news did arise though.  I managed to get Zapper to get passed the intro videos.  I have no idea why it didn't crash at that particular moment.  It did when I was approaching ingame though.  Strange.  Even stranger, when I tried running it again, it crashed with the same exception again.  I never could figure out what was wrong with this game let alone find out what API is causing the crash.  It looks like an internal issue with Windows user mode runtime .dlls, I guess.  Oh well, I was looking forward to playing this game on PC too.  Too bad my debugging skills suck, otherwise maybe we wouldn't have this issue as games that use the Blitz engine have the same issue it seems like.

Shogun.