Game:

Unreal Championship (2002)

Duration: 2:22

5,068 views

12

Sorry it took me so long to do this, but here it is. Finally, a video of Cxbx emulating Unreal Championship! Don't get your hopes up to high, the game isn't playable yet.

Check out my blog for more info and future updates: http://shogun3d-cxbx.blogspot.com/

Unreal Championship is a very difficult game to work with for Cxbx. If Cxbx was an LLE Xbox emulator, we might have more success with it. Why is this so? Well, for starters, I had to make multiple hacks for this game to function as much as you see it now. Some work, others work sometimes, and the rest don't work at all! The menus work just fine, but some menu options will cause Cxbx to crash as it is still buggy. You can create a profile no problem, but since .xpr file creation is not supported yet, you won't get an icon on the emulated HDD.

The real problem is that Unreal Championship tries to "relaunch" itself. So it opens up another instance of itself. When this happens, we need to close Cxbx, and open it again to go ingame. Why is this? I don't know why the programmers at Epic did this, but my guess is a way to cheaply and easily free up the 64MB of memory on the Xbox. If the default.xbe relaunches itself, then how does it know what map to load? Those details are saved across a certain function (XLaunchNewImage and XGetLaunchData) in 3kb data reserved for this purpose, so when the .xbe is launched again, it reads that 3kb and loads the appropriate data. Emulating this part is very easy. Just save that data to an external 3kb binary file. I named it CxbxLaunchData.bin so the next time XGetLaunchData is called, Cxbx loads it and gives the game access to it. The file is deleted after it is loaded. This works fine, but there's one problem... the controller state is lost! If it weren't for this, we might be going ingame by now. Sounds easy to fix? Think again, even Caustik is scratching his head with this one.

Oh well, I did the best I could to emulate this game. I'll keep working on it when I have time, but right now I have work to do. Stay tuned.

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