Spoiler tag

Thursday, September 10, 2015

JSRF partially emulated on PC

Hey there!

If you've looked before into it, so far no xbox emulators have been able to run JSRF, or for that matter run any complex xbox game properly.

But there's this new emulator in town called XQEMU that's making quite some progress, as a matter of fact they are able to run some big xbox titles to the point it loads in the menus or even ingame.

Here's JSRF running on the emulator, keep in mind the audio isn't yet emulated and the game runs slowly, the video was sped up by x5, but it will improve over time.





Now I don't meant to get you too excited, as so far the developers of XQEMU are focusing on compatibility and getting as many games to run as possible, emulating the graphics,  no audio yet, once they have made progress they will focus on optimizing the code, because right now most game run very slowly, at a few frames per second.

In retrospect, this emulator seems to be quite promising and is showing great progress, give it a few more years, its likely it will emulate xbox games fairly well.

You can find more about the emulator and the developers here:
http://xqemu.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7bLgtgM8QCOgxZLb_JkA-Q


14 comments:

  1. I don't need sound to hear the music!
    UNDERSTAND UNDERSTAND

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  2. Soon I hope!!! #___# I have it but I really hate setting up my XBOX.

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  3. How did you yourself learn how to reverse engineer JSRF for your data extraction tool? We know the game is coded in C thanks to Blitz. Love your work!

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    1. Thanks, well there's many ways to reverse engineer software, some people decompile the game/program executable file and read the low level CPU code called ASM (Assembly), I never did that because it would have taken me too long to learn and get good enough at it that I would be able to reverse engineering anything this way.

      So the way I did was I opened the game files in a hex editor and started searched for data that looked like decimals and then like sets of coordinates, from there I figured those points might be models, so I wrote a small application which would read the lists of points and import it into a 3D software to visualize them.

      Later on I started comparing the files one to another to find patterns and figure out the file structure and then what it meant, once I knew enough I could find the position of the blocks of data that contained the models and so on.

      I should write a blog post about this perhaps, when I have more time, I just never did because I thought it would be boring for most people and it also might be very long to explain (or I am bad at being succinct haha).


      Was JSRF coded in C or C++? I am guessing you meant "Blit" for the company that ported JSR knowing as BlitSoftware and Blitworks, let me know.

      Cheers

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    2. Thanks for your reply! I'm a budding programmer interested in knowing the inner workings of games. I started with C# now I'm getting nitty gritty with C.

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    3. The tweet was about JSR BUT there's an old Gamespot interview that had the chief programmer mention he uses "Visual C", implying he used C. The tweet is https://twitter.com/blitworks/status/628119399044653056

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    4. Thanks for confirming that, I might ask them on twitter if they know for JSRF :)

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    5. Any luck hearing from them? It's likely that it would still be coded in C style but probably C++ in some parts in order to interface with the Xbox's systems like IO.

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  4. This place is great man, good job! I was looking for art to fill the screen when I stream this game. The game is in 4:3 and the stream in 16:9 so theres some empty room on each side. The billboard signs are going to be good. It's so hard to find official art of this game that isnt all blury or too small in size.

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  5. How do you enable Test Run in all Chapters?

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  6. Still waiting, but i think they only care about 3DS.

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  7. 1 tip: XBox is a modified version of Windows 2000.

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    1. No, that doesn't help at all.
      The xbox software isn't anything like win millennium/2000.

      What needs to be emulated first is the hardware, which must of is is proprietary and undocumented.

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