Thursday, November 5, 2009

Continuing preliminary XACT support.

Yup, that's right, I'm finally getting around to adding XACT support for Cxbx. What is XACT? It's a cross platform audio API which was originally designed for the Xbox, but now included on the DirectX SDK and Xbox 360 SDK. It's a rather simple API and it shouldn't take too much work to get it up and running. So far I'm only adding it for XDK 4627 and 4928. The reason is that the only game I have access to that uses it is Unreal Championship. I've been working at this game trying to fix it for "years" (yes, it's that tough), and I have no intention on giving up yet. Besides, this was one of my first Xbox games and also one of the most memorable :) For now, I'll share my true motives for emulating this title later... I want it to be a surprise!

Even though XACT on Xbox1 is basically a wrapper for DirectSound, we still have no choice but to emulate it. Even though XACT is now on the PC, we still can't simply use the PC version of these interfaces because the .xwb and .xsb file formats appear to be different. Luckily for us, they have both been hacked and there are open source tools out there to help us learn how to parse these files ourselves. Since .xsb files generally use .wav files, I can easily use my custom wave loader to load sounds directly from that file. We'll still have to worry about non-standard PCM formats though (i.e. ADPCM, XBOXADPCM, etc.), but the Xbox Adpcm codec is also hacked and can be loaded via custom decoder.

When the preliminary support is finished, it will probably have the same status as DirectSound on Cxbx as just getting the functions hijacked are the most important thing. Then when the XDK samples work without crashing, then we can add the stuff that makes it work! Eventually, I want to get the Xbox Adpcm codec working. It shouldn't take too long, but it's only a medium priority now.

Oh yeah, I figured out why my XRefs were killing Cxbx. I forgot to increase the size of the XRef database array! I feel so stupid. Anyway, I can resume working on this HLE data base maintenance.

Shogun.

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