Thursday, November 19, 2009

Got my hands on a fairly rare Xbox game today! Haha.

Even though I'm still not off of my Cxbx break yet, I still want to share with you all what my plans are for when I'm ready to start working on it again. I still have multiple IRL things to take care of, and I think I burned myself out on Cxbx too many times. No worries, I shall return soon!

So, about this new game, what is it?? To much surprise, I got the opportunity to get my hands on a Japanese title (NTSC-J) known as "Petit Copter"! What is so great about this game? Well, after browsing the internals of this game, is looks like this game is of little complexity, uses an XDK Well supported by Cxbx (4361), only standard XDK libraries (No LTCG!), and an extremely simplified file structure. So far, this game looks very easy to emulate! I already did try running it with Cxbx, and the crash details so far appear to be very minor. The funny thing that happens with the debug output is that when the console is enabled, it crashes on a missing Xapi function (Rtl*Heap). On the other hand, this does not happen when the KrnlDbg.txt file is outputed; instead, it's a missing DirectSound function. No big deal though, nothing I can't fix.

When I take a good look at Cxbx, it appears that XDK 4361 has been a bit "neglected". Probably because there aren't (or at least it doesn't appear that) many games using this XDK exist. So far, I only have 2 besides Petit Copter (if you count Smashing Drive which uses 4242, but counted as 4361, that makes 3). Since I have this XDK already, finding the missing functions should be no problem. Can't wait to increase the compatibility list game count to 20!

Shogun.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Shogun, we have the following 4361 titles in XDKTracker (all are linked *without* LTCG luckily):

    - Burnout (both NTSC and PAL versions)
    - Crash Bandicoot tWoC (PAL)
    - Hunter: The Reckoning (PAL)
    - Petit Copter (JAP)
    - Star Wars Jedi Starfighter (both NTSC and PAL versions)
    - Tetris Worlds (NTSC)

    Cheers
    PatrickvL

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  2. Hi patrick! Thanks again for the information. So far I only have two of those games. I should get Burnout and Crash sometime. I do have Tetris Worlds Online (5233), but I'm a bit stuck on the XONLINE API stuff. I'm sure I can add the basic stuff necessary for XONLINE initialization (these APIs have been implemented for other XDKs) and compare it with 5344 since that's the closest XDK I have to 5233. Thanks again.

    Shogun.

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  3. Hey Shogun, I have a question. Each time you release an update for Cxbx, are you going to update the download links on the Cxbx website or is there some other place we're supposed to download the updates from? Thanks!

    -General Heed

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  4. Only caustik can update the website TBH. When I update Cxbx, I post my changes on my SVN at sourceforge.com meaning you'll have to compile them for yourself. You can do this easily with Microsoft VisualStudio.net C++ 2008 Express which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. Then you'll need to download the SVN and compile.

    ReplyDelete