|
It have been a slow few days for me, but there's still great progress to report:
A new member joined the team: Robert from Austria.
He'll be working on XAPI detection and patching.
Rob has already made a signature file for all XAPI functions, and concluded that it's possible to detect multiple XDK versions with a single set of XAPI signatures.
That great news actually, because it saves us from building detection per version, and also enables us make a small logging-patch for _all_ XAPI's. This will give us detailed insight in the XAPI-calling-patterns of every game we can get our hands on!
Robert also found out why some games can't be converted to an EXE : I'd seems that the Xbox accepts more sections in an executable than Windows XP - one game had 137 sections, which XP refused to MapAndLoad...
All this has spurred Shadow_tj to pick up the pace - he's been translating big parts of the Cxbx codebase into Delphi.
Me, I'm still busy figuring out how all the 387 Kernel API's should look, because it's important that the calling convention, the number of arguments, their types and type of return value (if any) matches the Xbox version exactly (one mistake and the stack could become corrupted). It's a mind-numbingly boring job, and even more depressing is the realization that we'll have to do the same thing for all XAPI's that we must patch (and the most depressing part is, that there's about twenty times as many XAPI's then there are Kernel API's)....
So, that's where we stand right now : nowhere near a working emulator for a long time, that's for sure.
Anyone that feels him- or her-self up to the tasks at hand (like translating C to Delphi, figuring out original method signatures, and any other general coding & testing) should not hesitate to join us - You're all very welcome, because currently we need all the help we can get!
Cheers,
PatrickvL
|