Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Got Cxbx running on my retro gaming PC

This evening, I fired up my old Dell B1000r because I needed a 32-bit machine running Windows XP for a few tasks.  Then I thought to myself "I wonder if I can run Cxbx on this old thing...".  Surprisingly, it worked!  The specs: Pentium III 1Ghz, GeForce 5200 (AGP), and 384mb Ram.  Although I didn't have much on the hard drive, I did get to play around a little bit.


That's a screenshot of the intro video of Innocent Tears (Japan only; XDK 4627).  Now, I will be honest and say that I did alter this screenshot a bit.  The intro video only runs at half the normal size when the YUV overlay is converted to RGB via software.  Using hardware accelerated YUV overlays fixes the problem, but then you can't take screenshots of it because YUV surfaces can't be screen grabbed normally on XP, so I just stretched the image.  Btw, just in case you are wondering why I never gave updates on this game before, I had reached a blocking issue when trying to get this title ingame.  Honestly, I can't remember what it was either. For those who want to see the intro video in action, I've uploaded the video on Youtube (I'm surprised no one has done this before).



I didn't have any of the games I knew were playable on this machine, so I couldn't verify by playing Turok, Smashing Drive, Whacked, Robotech BattleCry, etc.  Next time, when it's not in use, I'll hook up my old Seagate HDD that contains most of my dumped games, see if Turok runs at playable speeds, lol.  I know Robotech won't since I had a hard time getting 20fps out of that game on more advanced hardware.

Although Cxbx runs on this ancient gaming PC that once cost $2700 usd, I dunno if I could actually use it to work on updates for it.  Doesn't hurt to try, of course.  If only that thing didn't generate so much heat though.  It's summer time, and my apartment doesn't have AC either :(

Just thought I'd give you all an update since I *might* have a means to work on this again.  Not a solid guarantee, but I'll investigate later.  Until next time.

Shogun.

3 comments:

  1. Brother, keep up the good work on this emulator.

    Would also be released for the Dreamcast!

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    Replies
    1. The Dreamcast port of that game got cancelled tbh. Then the devs said "Hey, let's port it to Xbox!".

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    2. Comic !!!
      Truth was canceled for the Dreamcast.

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