Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Azurik: A hack worth a mention

This was the positive result of a hack done by JayFox some time ago, and I don't believe I've ever shared it here.  And the reason I'm sharing this is because it's screen footage of XQEMU running my favourite Xbox game, Azurik: Rize of Perathia!









There's a reason why I've always considered this game to be one of, if not the, hardest games to emulate on Xbox.  I couldn't fix it on Cxbx (and I tried for years), Microsoft couldn't do it, and even JayFox himself had quite a bit of trouble with it.  In order for this game to work, JayFox had to add a series of hacks.  I don't remember what he did, but getting it this far was quite a feat.  From what I remember, he tells me that the bug you see is an issue with floating point precision for vertex skinned meshes.  I ran into a similar issue on Cxbx, but it was much more severe as everything was greatly distorted.

The hacks used to get this far are not in his main branch, so I cannot replicate it.  Just wanting to share a bit of news that never seemed to get the mention it deserved.

Shogun.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Oh no, is xqemu dead??

Heh, of course not!

Now, your concern about the xqemu project is greatly appreciated, however it's important to remember that JayFox and espes are two busy people.  Both of them last I checked are busy with University classes and what not, and espes has a job also.  So lately they've had their hands full.  Every once and a while progress on an emu will slow down due to IRL taking priority, that doesn't mean that it's dead because you haven't heard anything in a while or haven't seen any updates on github in a few months.  Trust me, it's not going anywhere; *Madara Uchiha voice* settle down!

So, for all of you SEGA fans out there, please enjoy this video of House of the Dead 3.  Runs quite nicely, no?


The speed of the video was increased by 8x roughly.  So considering how problematic this game was to emulate on Cxbx and xqemu at first, I'd say that xqemu is doing just fine.  The compatibility is pretty good in many cases, just a few things to sort out here and there.

Shogun.