Xbox Dashboard (3944)

I haven't done any serious work on Cxbx since June this year due to the fact that not only am I spending more time working on my own emulator but working towards getting a long term job (I've been getting quite a few good job prospects), but last night I wanted to play around with the source a bit. And what do you know? Something good came of it after all. I managed to get the Xbox Dashboard (the one built with XDK 3944) to launch, so don't go dumping your own dashboard and send me crazy questions/complaints pertaining to their dashboard not emulating. Only the very first retail Xbox Dashboard works so far, NOT any latter ones yet. I have a copy of the 4920 dashboard, but I have to find it.

Most of the menus can be accessed without problems, but you may get some bogus results sometimes. The time/date is automatically set to the time your computer is running. The memory section doesn't work yet because I can't get the dashboard to accept the fact that I'm not emulating any memory cards! It's probably because there's more to emulating XMountMURootA() then I thought; I just redirected it to XMountMU to get it over with. Oh, and checking the system details will cause a crash.

Quite frankly, I've been working at this for quite a while in the past, but like I always say, I tend to make the best progress after leaving it for a while, then coming back and getting something working! It wasn't exactly "hard" (for the most part), just a matter of hacking my way around certain things. I ended up adding quite a few new features to some existing implementations such as the "Y:" drive (which I just redirected to the current directory) and some other things I can't really remember.

"Why emulate the dashboard?" Because I felt like it, for starters. Second, I like the challenge, which may lead to fixing bigger bugs. You know what I mean, right?

If you look through the source code (at what I changed) you'll notice that HalReturnToFirmware doesn't return when the error code is 4 (the one that makes your Xbox show the multi-language screen saying your Xbox needs servicing). That's just a silly hack to get passed the "Challenge Response Protocall" code since Cxbx doesn't properly emulate the kernel functionality to do it (i.e. XcSHAInit/Update/Final). For a more detailed understanding if you don't know what that is, read this thread: http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=455.70;wap2

Don't have much else to say except I did comment out the Gamma Ramp code to prevent problems with certain games in fullscreen mode (Unreal Championship, Azurik: Rize of Perathia, and Robotech: Battlecry in particular). If you need that functionality, just delete the comments in front of the PC equivelant in EmuD3D8.cpp. Okay?

Have fun,

Shogun.

EDIT: The Youtube video for those who want to see it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIeMbH6ug-c