Progress Report: Jan - Apr 10th 2018

Firstly, I should apologize for the late progress report, I intended to get a report published before the end of March, but I was busy with work, thank you all for being so patient.

Now that's out the way, Cxbx-Reloaded has made excellent progress these last few months, with a total of 619 commits by 14 contributors, consisting of the usual slew of minor tweaks and fixes, but also many significant changes:

LLE: NV2A (GPU) (#1018) 

We have succeeded in porting the NV2A implementation from XQEMU to Cxbx-Reloaded. It's still far from perfect, and incredibly slow, (less than 1FPS in many titles) so will remain an optional feature for the meantime. This is significant because it allows us to stop patching and forwarding the Xbox Direct3D implementation to Windows, and actually emulate the hardware functionality, leading to better accuracy and higher compatibility. Right now, it should still be considered experimental, but in the not-to-distant future, it should become the recommended way to run Cxbx-Reloaded.

Beats of Rage (Homebrew) using the NV2A LLE implementation

Kernel/XAPI: Fibers (#1033)  

We finally fixed support for Fibers. Very few games make use of this functionality, but it is an important part of the Xbox kernel and is used by quite a few notable titles. With this, the Dead or Alive titles Team Ninja finally boot.

Dead or Alive 3, which requires a working implementation of Fibers

HLE: Introduced support for LTCG titles (#1023)

For it's entire history, Cxbx-Reloaded, the original Cxbx and Dxbx were unable to boot titles using LTCG. For a long time, we have touted the idea that it is impossible to support these titles via HLE, but that isn't strictly true... What we meant was that it's more work than it's worth, and the work could be better spent on implementing the GPU on the low level, making this unnecessary. That being said, Jarupxx put some work into creating an OOVPA database for some LTCG libraries, allowing Sonic Riders to reach in-game, even when using HLE. (However, they are generally more broken and unstable than non LTCG titles)

Sonic Riders (LTCG) running on Cxbx-Reloaded's HLE

HLE: Fixed broken polygons in early XDKs (#1045)

Due to an oversight in the index buffer handling code, titles developed with XDKs older than 4034 had severe rendering issues for most users. This has now been resolved

Dashboard 1.0.4034 - Before

Dashboard 1.0.4034 - After

HLE: DSOUND Improvements (#990 & #1042 )

Thanks to the efforts of Radwolfie, our HLE DirectSound implementation improved significantly, now there are even less audio issues than before. Jet Set Radio future no longer emits loud static, and these changes also allowed Burnout to reach game play.

Burnout, now in-game thanks to the recent DirectSound improvements.

A shiny new logo (#1019)

Designed by CakeLancelot, with tweaks by RadWolfie & DriveClub based on input from the community. Licence: CC BY 4.0 

Other Tweaks/Fixes

There have been many more changes/improvements made within this period, too many to list in one post: To see all changes, check our repository PR history here.