Progress Update (May 2019)

Despite the lack of Patreon updates, Cxbx-Reloaded's development has been in full swing with plenty of notable Improvements:

1. Cxbx-R now builds with CMake. This provides no immediate benefit but it opens the door to compiling with other toolchains, work will be taken to get Cxbx-R compiling with MinGW, after which we can work on a potential Linux build using Winelib. Although not a fully native build, it's still a step in the right direction. (No promises right now, as it may not be viable right now, but we'll definitely look into this)

2. Futurama became fully playable: This has long been broken due to an issue with the handling of Fibers (a form of co-operative threading)

3. The boot-dash issue in Jet Set Radio Future was partially fixed: It still doesn't render 100% correctly, but it no longer completely obscures the view: bumping the game up to playable status. There are no more game breaking issues remaining, only minor visual inaccuracies.

4. With a fix to the Direct3D BeginPush/EndPush API, Rallisport Challange is now able to go in-game. Still rather broken, but no longer crashes outright. This is likely to improve many other games too.

5. Performance of the default configuration improved significantly: Performance now matches that of the 'Render to Host Backbuffer' hack, without using the hack.

6. Support for so-called 'declaration-only' vertex shaders was improved: This brings a significant jump in rendering correctness in some titles: at-least Sega GT Online, Mechassault, and High Rollers Casino showed noticeable improvements.

7. Timing improvements allow many games that previously ran too-fast to run at the correct speed. The frame-rate limiter is now automatically disabled when the running title uses  D3DPRESENT_INTERVAL_IMMEDIATE, mirroring actual hardware behaviour on this scenario.

I'm still working hard on Sega Chihiro support, most of the pieces are coming together and I hope to be able to make it available in the main builds soon. Current status on that is that Chihiro Type-1 emulation is at a point where the majority of games boot, most tests in the factory test software pass successfully. 

We just need to provide mappings for the game-specific input devices: For the most part, Chihiro support is held back due to user-interface problems, rather than actual emulation problems. Chihiro Type-3 emulation is currently non-existent, so no Outrun 2 SP just yet, I'm afraid. 

As for general emulation, there has been the usual improvement to compatibility. I tasked a friend with testing their Xbox game library, and these are the results they gave me:

Out of the 200 games that were tested, more than half were In-Game or better. This is a far cry from Cxbx of old where the majority of games refused to even start.

The full list of titles they tested is attached to this post. Expect screenshots and/or showcase videos to follow in the coming days.