Someone is Stealing my Identity!

Okay, this is pretty outrageous.  Who the hell would go this far as to impersonate me on reddit?  Wtf?  Yes, you heard right, someone is pretending to be me, don't be fooled...

Thanks to yun-daddy, I caught wind of this yesterday (maybe he did it, lol).  I didn't get around to reading it before because I was busy (yes, I was actually working on Cxbx for a change), so I had initially assumed someone was making a post in my honour or wanted to inquire about my past work.  Turns out that was not the case.  I should have investigated before things snowballed into what it is now.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/3bhisz/blueshogun96_here_author_of_the_original_xbox/

For those of you who want proof that this is fake, consider these.

1. I haven't been going to school at all.  In fact, I haven't set foot in a university since 2007.
2. I stated that I don't have a job earlier on my blog.  Btw, for those of you who were wondering how my interview with 343 went, I didn't get the job because they wanted a more experienced C# dev.
3. When I make announcements or just want to speak my thoughts on Cxbx, I do it here first, then link it other places.  In fact, I've never had a reddit account in my life until today (and my nickname there is "real_blueshogun96").
4. When did I EVER claim to be the author of Cxbx or XQEMU?  Never.... Not.  Even.  Once.  These were originally written by Caustik and espes, respectively.
5. I never even stated that I would have a definite means of working on Cxbx.  My retro gaming PC which I mentioned yesterday isn't truly ideal to work on it.  XQEMU is another story though, but I'd like to work on getting the setup working on my Mac Pro aside my Macbook.
6. His impersonation of me is terrible.  I sign my statements as "Shogun", I never refer to my favourite console as "OG Xbox" because there's nothing "Original Gangsta" about Xbox.  Lol, I had to make some fun out of this.

 Looking on the bright side, I must really be special if someone is going out of their way to impersonate me of all emu devs.  Besides, they say it pays to advertise!  But in the mean time, I'm going to start another reddit post regarding this imposter as well as link back to this blog post as proof.

So, now that you are aware of all this, don't be fooled.

Shogun.

Got Cxbx running on my retro gaming PC

This evening, I fired up my old Dell B1000r because I needed a 32-bit machine running Windows XP for a few tasks.  Then I thought to myself "I wonder if I can run Cxbx on this old thing...".  Surprisingly, it worked!  The specs: Pentium III 1Ghz, GeForce 5200 (AGP), and 384mb Ram.  Although I didn't have much on the hard drive, I did get to play around a little bit.

That's a screenshot of the intro video of Innocent Tears (Japan only; XDK 4627).  Now, I will be honest and say that I did alter this screenshot a bit.  The intro video only runs at half the normal size when the YUV overlay is converted to RGB via software.  Using hardware accelerated YUV overlays fixes the problem, but then you can't take screenshots of it because YUV surfaces can't be screen grabbed normally on XP, so I just stretched the image.  Btw, just in case you are wondering why I never gave updates on this game before, I had reached a blocking issue when trying to get this title ingame.  Honestly, I can't remember what it was either. For those who want to see the intro video in action, I've uploaded the video on Youtube (I'm surprised no one has done this before).

I didn't have any of the games I knew were playable on this machine, so I couldn't verify by playing Turok, Smashing Drive, Whacked, Robotech BattleCry, etc.  Next time, when it's not in use, I'll hook up my old Seagate HDD that contains most of my dumped games, see if Turok runs at playable speeds, lol.  I know Robotech won't since I had a hard time getting 20fps out of that game on more advanced hardware.

Although Cxbx runs on this ancient gaming PC that once cost $2700 usd, I dunno if I could actually use it to work on updates for it.  Doesn't hurt to try, of course.  If only that thing didn't generate so much heat though.  It's summer time, and my apartment doesn't have AC either :(

Just thought I'd give you all an update since I *might* have a means to work on this again.  Not a solid guarantee, but I'll investigate later.  Until next time.

Shogun.

Uploading my Cxbx source branch to github...

Wow, has it really been almost a year since I've updated this blog?  Well, shame on me... O_o

Where have I been?  For the past two years, I've been working on building up my career.  Things are going good now and most of my financial troubles are over (minus a few bogus debts that ended up in my name due to identity theft and a lease I shouldn't have signed).  Although I was laid off one month ago, I'm getting a steady stream of interviews from multiple companies.  In fact, I have an interview with 343 Industries tomorrow morning *cross fingers*.

Recently, me and LoveMHz have been talking about the good old days of working on Cxbx (well, tbh the good old days were 10+ years ago) and shared a few thoughts.  A day or two before that, I finally got around to taking a look at Cxbx-Reloaded's support for x64 which run without the aid of the debug console which is essential for me.  For some people, it worked just fine.  For me, however, I couldn't get a single game to run (not even Smashing Drive or Turok).  I'm running Win8.1 x64 right now, and have been using a 64-bit OS for quite some time, so I haven't touched Cxbx in quite a while because of it.

Due to the nostalgia I had, I dug up my old source branch and uploaded it to github.  I realized that I had added months worth of work that never made it to the SVN (8 months worth of updates to be exact), and it didn't seem fair to just forget about it.  Did a bit of work to get it compilable under Visual Studio 2015, and if you have a 32-bit OS, you can go ahead and have at it.  Sorry, I never did get the 64-bit update working on my branch.

Link: https://github.com/blueshogun96/Cxbx

Feel free to check out anything else I've got on github (not much, besides a few experiments and this really bulky open source game engine I started writing).  Unfortunately, you may not see many updates to Cxbx because I don't have a 32-bit OS to work on atm.  I would use VMware, but atm my CPU surprisingly does not support Intel VTx (hardware virtualization).  It's an older Mac Pro with low end Xeon 5130.  When I get a chance, I'll upgrade to an x5650 for 8 cores at 3Ghz, plus VTx.

Take care,

Shogun.