Status Update - October 2020

Hey there! This progress report is going to be rather short, but it doesn't mean I was lazying all month. Quite the opposite - I was mostly contributing to Cxbx-Reloaded and managed to do so much it would not be possible to list everything in this report!

So, let's get to it.

Cxbx-Reloaded

Honestly, until last month I didn't care much about Xbox emulation. I knew that it's there, it's progressively getting better, and the team has been making rather good progress, but every time I tried the games I wished to play they either didn't display anything or crashed right away. Somewhat I annoyed with it, I eventually decided to stop wishing for them to magically get fixed and look into it on my own.

The first game I looked into was NASCAR Heat 2002 - for no particular reason, I just liked the PS2 version of this game and noticed the Xbox version looks very different and far better. After around two weeks of development, I got the game from crashing on startup to looking and performing nearly perfect! 

As it always is with emulators, fixing bugs showing in one game may fix an unknown amount of other games, and that was likely the case here too. That said, I haven't stopped and I kept pushing fixes for bugs my other games were hitting throughout the month. Overall, I pushed so many fixes so I cannot realistically list them all (and there is more to come), but as of now I have improved the following games I tested:

• NASCAR Heat 2002 - progressed from crashing on startup to being Playable, with very minor glitches related to incorrect audio volumes and incorrect shadows behavior. Those issues are so minor I had to compare against gameplays on YT to notice that something is wrong.
• The Warriors - progressed from crashing on startup to potentially being Playable. One of the pull requests fixing cutscene audio issues is still not merged, but once it's in the game may or may not be playable. I have not tested it past the tutorial, but testers have been able to play it for hours in one sitting without issues. The Warriors on Xbox looks a lot better than on PS2 and PSP, so this might be the best version to play! I'm looking forward to doing that.
• Group S Challenge - fixed a startup crash occurring with one of the game versions. The game is still not playable.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - a game which "broke" because of my NASCAR Heat 2002 changes. Turns out it was unrelated and I later fixed the real underlying bug, which I made a post about earlier this month.
• Burnout 3 - fixed issues with EA Trax playing on game startup and made menus show fine for the first time. I also technically improved rendering, but because of an unrelated bug it's not possible to see those improvements on screen. The game is still not playable, and I foresee it will stay this way for a long time - because of heavy code inlining by the compiler, Cxbx-Reloaded is unable to properly patch critical D3D functions used by the game to draw the final scene on screen.
• Midtown Madness 3 - fixed numerous issues causing startup crashes and allowed the game to progress to menus. Currently still renders nothing, but once the vertex declaration PR is merged, visuals are going to improve. I'll potentially pick this game up again once those changes are finalized.

Do note that those are only the games I tested personally - according to Cxbx-Reloaded testers I may have improved 10+ other games, potentially making some of them playable. I've been told that October Progress Report is going to be the biggest Cxbx-Reloaded has ever seen 😬

What's next?

I don't intend to stop working on Cxbx-Reloaded, so expect more improvements in the future! However, seeing how I often switch projects I contribute to, maybe November is going to bring something different again? I don't know that myself.