LukeUsher

Project Update - Mid 2023

Once again, I apologise for the lack of posts here; going forward I will set reminders and commit to bi-annually updates/progress reviews of what has happened with every project I touch; but there may be bonus posts in-between, if a single event is noteworthy.

For those who have been following for a long time, you will know that I work on many emulation and game preservation related projects, the main ones being:

Cxbx-Reloaded: A HLE xbox emulator for Microsoft W...

More online server revivals? Proof of Concept

Let's start with a note: This is not a serious attempt/project yet; Insignia still has the focus as far as online service revivals are concerned.

The Nokia N-Gage actually had an online gaming service, depending on the game, it provided online multiplayer, leaderboards, etc.

This service has been dead for considerable time now, it has not been possible to even get far enough to see a login screen...

What you see in this video is a proof of concept as a result of an hour or...

Insignia - OG Xbox Live

If you're following my patreon, chances are you already know this, but I know many of you are following for different projects/reasons, so just for good measure:

For the last few years, I have been working with a few friends of mine on a project to restore Xbox Live to the Original Xbox console from 2001.

It took a lot of time and effort to get this working, but we finally launched!

Insignia is a FREE replacement server for Xbox Live, that, for the first time since Microsof...

Insignia

Most people who follow me are likely aware by now, but the beta of our Xbox Live server, Insignia, is now available!

This restores Xbox Live functionality in 25 games at present, both on real Xbox hardware and via emulation (only xemu at present,Cxbx-Reloaded will work as soon as we can fix whatever is stopping the latest msdash version from running properly)

The reception has been great so far and it's all very exciting, check it out at 2022-11-18 16:24:03 +0000 UTC View Post

It's time to talk about ares

As many people are aware, Cxbx-Reloaded only scratches the surface when it comes to what projects I'm involved with. At this point it's well known that I also work on Insignia, an Xbox Live revival server but not everything I do is Xbox related.

ares is a multi-system emulator derived from higan, which was derived from bsnes, originating as a Super Nintendo/Super Famicom emulator but growing over the years. This history is rather complex but is summed up nicely on the ares website: 2021-10-14 15:11:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Progress Report (July+August+September 2021)

Although there haven't been many code contributions to Cxbx-R in recent weeks, we have been very busy with testing. We are proud to announce that every single Xbox game in our database has now been tested.

This brings our playable games total to 162 (15.7% of the entire library), with only 89 games still doing nothing. Over the next few weeks, we plan to iterate through the games in the “Nothing” category, to attempt to get them at least booting, 100% of games reaching intr...

Progress Report (June 2021)

Progress Report (June 2021)

After many sleepless nights, I’m very happy to announce that this month we got another huge compatibility improvement: 12 new playable games! Mostly due to the major work done (and teased a lot…) with the implementation of HLSL pixel shaders. As usual, 12 playable games doesn’t cover all the games that improved (more could be playable, but I didn’t have time to verify other games further), but hurray, we’ve reached 15.06% of the ent...

Progress Report (May 2021)

Playing a game, having fun… oh, controller’s battery about to die? That was a very bad situation where the fellow CxBx-Reloaded user would be stuck without being able to save or really do anything else. Good news? That’s a thing of the past: you can now plug, unplug and switch controllers without needing to restart the emulation to get them working again! Other than this nice improvement, we also had some compatibility gains (didn’t report some of them here or on the site yet due to t...

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (April 2021)

Many people probably saw ImGui being used as the main GUI in emulation projects, and this month it’s part of our own graphical interface bringing some interesting new features, including some nice debug information in real time. Some old options (heritage from the old CxBx original project behavior) were removed, visual issues were fixed in many games and some game breaking issues were fixed bringing us another 3 playa...

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (March 2021)

Progress Report (March 2021)

And here we go with a quick recap of everything that improved this month: yet another global performance improvement, more rendering improvements (some that made at least two games become fully playable), another input device supported (arcade joystick) and some other nice quality of life improvements to make CxBx-Reloaded better/easier to use.

General Improvements

Add D3D9 half-pixel offset [ 2021-05-06 15:25:13 +0000 UTC View Post

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (January - February 2021)

That’s right, this is our first report covering 2 months at once. Depending on how much work is made that can be actually visible to most people, it’s probably for the best to cover it this way. Compatibility wise we kept our average from the last year (5 new playable games per month) and if performance was a concern in some games I’m also happy to announce that this improved a lot with some rendering optimizations.

General Improvements

2021-03-30 15:30:22 +0000 UTC View Post

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (Dec 2020)

Progress Report (December 2020)

~ It's late again, I'm sorry. Between lockdown fatigue and being a new parent, posting this kind of slipped my mind. Strelok wrote this up way back on January 10th, so this report covers progress made in December 2020;

Strelok here with yet another report and Ho Ho Ho… a bit too late for this I guess? Late or not, a gift is a gift, and this is how I see the progress we’ve made in the last month of the year. Comp...

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (November 2020)

Progress Report (November 2020)

Surprisingly, this month was much more scarier for me than October: the amount of changes and improvements made and their frequency (don’t even get me started on this, I couldn’t look away from Github for more than 6 hours and BANG, already had yet another huge commit merged and ready for testing…) was nothing short of amazing. With a lot of improvements, you’re probably already asking “ok, great, but something else is playable?...

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (October 2020)

NOTE: This was written and ready to go by November 2nd, I apologise for the delay posting, life got in the way, anyway, here goes:

Welcome everyone, to our spooky scary October report! What is so scary about it? The size of this thing to begin with. The amount of games that improved this month alone is enough to send chills down my spine (seriously, I hope you have some time to spare reading the results I got…), and a lot of improvements to various parts of the code...

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (September 2020)

Welcome to our September report! I’m especially excited to cover the changes of this month with you all since we had great improvements all around: no more annoying stretched aspect ratio while running in fullscreen, some sounds improvements, rendering improvements, debugger coming back from the dead and… wait for it… mouse and keyboard support!

As usual, let’s take a look at the compatibility numbers before anything else:

2020-10-20 12:34:48 +0000 UTC View Post

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (August 2020)

For this month (as I’ve promised to some people), I’ve put some extra hours into testing and re-testing games until we could reach a very specific milestone: 50% of the entire Xbox library tested (check the numbers below and the long list of results at the end). Some of the improvements also came from some information cross-projects (Insignia), making it possible to save/load games for the first time for some titles. SSX games didn’t have much progress last month? Now all of them progre...

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (July 2020)

This month was fairly quiet progress wise, but we still have some results to show you all, the improvement that’s already been done but was not that visible due to the lack of testing (all results from the “Notable Game Improvements” were compiled from a short testing section I did recently, so this is far from being an exhaustive list on everything that actually improved).

2020-08-15 12:38:15 +0000 UTC View Post

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (June 2020)

After all the new playable games on the last report, I’m sure no one actually expected something even bigger from June, but for the sake of my sleepless nights: WE DID IT!

We’ve finally reached 100 playable games, covering 10% of the entire Xbox library. What? You want even more? Ok, what about sound improvements and better HLE kernel accuracy? More ways to be sure your game was dumped properly? We got you covered. First, let’s take a look at the numbers: 

2020-07-13 07:26:53 +0000 UTC View Post

Presented without commentary: Unreal Championship on Insignia.

Cxbx-Reloaded Progress Report (May 2020)

 Welcome to the 1% Special Report™!

Ok, but what’s so special about this month? May alone had a major compatibility improvement, with CxBx-Reloaded getting 1%+ of the entire Xbox library of retail games reaching the playable status (going from 76 in April to a nice 87 total of playable games in May). Even outside of these playable results we have much more to show: rendering changes made a lot of other games behave much closer to the expected visuals and some more work in progr...

Announcing Insignia - a replacement for Xbox Live

Although Cxbx-Reloaded is my primary project, it is not the only project I am involved with.

Insignia is a replacement server for the Xbox's online services and is currently in development privately.
 

This service will not require any modifications or patches to software and will work with both stock and modded consoles as long as you have a way to dump keys (a one-time game exploit could be used for this).

The implementation is completely clean room and has been i...

Progress Report (April 2020)

This was an interesting month: we didn’t have an April fools joke…but instead, we had FIVE more playable games (you were waiting for a punchline? Too bad!). Perhaps you have an AMD GPU and it’s annoyed about some games that can’t even show graphics without using a wrapper… then I’ve good news for you too: this regression was finally fixed! As usual, tons of games were improved one step further into playable territory and some work just started to fix several oth...

Progress Report (March 2020)

As usual, our friend Strelok/Literalmente{Game} has kindly written this progress report for us.

Audio (once again) was a major player in the improvements of this month. As you can see below, we didn’t have a lot of commits made, but they’re enough to make at least another exclusive game fully playable for the first time (and as always, improved a ton of other games along the way).

2020-04-05 15:55:45 +0000 UTC View Post

Progress Report (February 2020)

Do you expect some exclusive game reaching in-game for the first time? What about some sound improvements that also made some games that never booted to reach in-game for the first time? World’s First (not exactly..)?! While the compatibility numbers shown below aren’t as great as the latest 3 months, don’t let them cloud your judgement: the progress made this month affected even games that we can’t exactly confirm for now (blocked by some previous regression), so the...

Progress Report (January 2020)

Progress Report (January 2020)

2020 starts with several audio improvements, affecting not only issues with some games sound effects and music stuck in a loop, but also compatibility (as some games depend on more accurate sound emulation to progress beyond some specific parts). And talking about compatibility...

General Improvements

PSA: AMD Users

We’re having a lot of reports of users with AMD graphics hardware having issues with Cxbx-Reloaded. This usually manifests as broken graphics or missing 3D elements.

If you use AMD hardware and experience issues with games known to work, you can use dxvk wrapper as a workaround for the time being, while we investigate a fix.

Progress Report (December 2019)

How much everyone enjoyed the improvements from November? Since we had such a huge boost in compatibility, optimizations and general stability, December couldn't possibly be better, right? NOPE.xbe! Rendering changes improved the compatibility AND the performance for so many games that I almost didn't sleep trying to cover every single progress made, so I hope you all enjoy reading about the changes and be sure to check the improved games section (as it's even bigger than the last month) ...

Progress Report (November)

Strelok gave me the text for this progress report a few weeks back, unfortunately I got sick and was out of action for just over a week, so I apologise to all for the lateness of this report.

Strelok here again and I hope you guys liked the amount of progress reported in the last post... because we have much more to talk about this month. From usability improvements, to performance optimizations and many bug fixes, a lot of games are now running better (some of them even runn...

Progress Report (August to October)

Our friend and tester Strelok has taken a stab at writing our next progress report. He usually collects the stats and produces the graphics/lists that I add to every report, so it only makes sense to give him a chance to write one himself, let's hand over to him.

Hello everyone, I'm Strelok (aka Hector... aka that guy...), first time writing a progress report for CxBx-Reloaded and this time we'll not cover a single month or specific feature, but everything that happened on the proje...

Progress Report (July 2019)

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the late progress report. No excuses, just life got in the way.

So July was a very busy month for Cxbx-Reloaded, with 29 pull-requests being merged within 31 days, consisting of 86 commits. That's a lot of code, but most of the changes are minor improvements. The most notable changes are as follows:

High Resolution Rendering

[PR 1655: https://...