Status Update - December 2021

Hello from 2022! After a very lazy November, December wasn't much better but at least it saw a new (unofficial yet) release - cheat generators for several games from Codemasters.

DuckStation

• UI improvements - another batch of UI changes in DuckStation - making memory card fields not editable and standardizing buttons all over the codebase. Now buttons like Save/Cancel/Close use standard Qt's functionality, simplifying code and most importantly, translations.

Cxbx-Reloaded

• Fixup Win10 CPU Sets to check the EfficiencyClass - around a year ago, I added a new affinity scheduler to Cxbx-Reloaded using a Windows 10-only CPU Sets API. Back then, I assumed that the first physical core is the most optimal one to use for Xbox threads, since "all the cores should be the same".
  Since then, Intel has released Alder Lake processors with performance and efficiency cores, so suddenly the assumption that all cores are identical got invalidated - and since this month I upgraded my slowly aging PC, that's one of the first things I checked with my brand new CPU :) As it stands, the assumption that the first core is optimal was still okay, but it's not guaranteed to always be the case. With this PR, I futureproofed the code by making it look for the most performant core, in case it ever ends up not being "the first".

GameCheat Unlockers

GameCheat Unlockers (working title) is a joint project of myself and Nenkai, a Gran Turismo modding guru. Together we took on a task to create unlockers and/or generators for cheat codes from Codemasters games. Their PS2 and PS3 era games lacked traditional cheat codes, instead using a system where users had "personalized" codes that could be purchased from Codemasters online or over the phone.

Those services are of course long gone, and so are cheats - therefore, we started tackling Colin McRae Rally and TOCA Race Drivers together, and at the moment we have most of them figured out. For CMRs, we have cheat generators published, while for TOCA we opted for in-game unlockers since TOCA's generators use RSA keys and therefore are technically "uncrackable".

The tools are not released "officially" yet, but binaries and Python scripts can be downloaded from the repository.

MKPSXISO

Work on refreshed mkpsxiso is still ongoing, now with contributions from several other people! Since last month, more work was done on ensuring exported XML definitions preserve all attributes. G4Vi was also hard at work ensuring audio tracks are exported and imported properly, they also came up with a way to import/export audio tracks as FLAC and working on simplifying the DA code overall!

We still have no ETA on a "final" release, but thanks to spicyjpeg and G4Vi we now have GtiHub Actions set up, which means releases are being prepared automatically from every commit.

2022?

To be fair, I do not have any specific plans for 2022. There are several games I consider looking into, one of them being Rally Trophy - as of the time of writing this post, AuToMaNiAk005 (you may remember that name from SilentPatch for TOCA2) has just teased a perfectly looking widescreen fix. However, he seems to have issues fixing up some of the UI elements, and I may be able to help there. It's also a game from Bugbear Entertainment, and I wanted to work with one of those for a while!