ares Projects 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 Windows
Insignia: A free replacement server for Xbox Live for the Original Xbox
ares: A cross-platform, multi-system emulator; of which I became the project lead back in 2021.

Due to the sheer amount of work involved in recreating an online service, Insignia is currently taking up the majority of my time, with ares being second, and Cxbx-Reloaded being the lowest on the scale at present, although I do have some ideas on how to kickstart development again, more on this in a later post.

Cxbx-Reloaded:

This project has had the least activity over all the other projects we will discuss in this post. Owing to my day job, the ares emulator and Insignia taking up the majority of my time, and other developers being mostly busy with real-life, progress is very slow, with the latest build of the emulator (containing emulation changes) dating all the way back to March.

So far in 2023, Cxbx-Reloaded has seen the following changes:

The emulator will no longer auto region-patch loaded games; this was causing many games to fail to boot, instead, a warning message will be displayed giving the user a choice to continue, or a chance to change their emulated Xbox region.
A bug was fixed that could prevent the emulator for correctly determining if it was already running in another process
The symbol database was updated, this brought in a significant improvement to symbol detection/scanning which should improve compatibility.
A bug was fixed in thread priority handling which fixed a deadlock in Metal Slug 3, the GTA games, and improves stability of Halo 2, although it is not yet playable.
A bug was fixed with object handling which prevented a crash in Area 51
A bug was fixed that could lead to infinite recursion of DPC routines, this fixed another issue that caused Halo 2 to crash on boot.
A regression in D3D symbol handling was fixed, improving GTA: San Andreas
A bug was fixed that was preventing non-ascii file paths from working in multi-xbe games, fixing NASCAR Heat 2002.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of active testers, we are unsure how this has impacted the overall compatibility numbers; as the majority of games still remain untested on the latest release. If you notice something incorrect or missing in the compatibility database, please reach out on the Cxbx-Reloaded discord server, so that we can update it.

Insignia

After several years of development, Insignia finally launched to as an invite only beta in November 2022; with a total of 25 games being available on the network.

Since then, we have grown to have 8,000 registered Xbox consoles, 7,000 registered gamertags (user accounts), and we now support a total of 110 games; approximately a quarter of the entire online library of the original Xbox; while we are still considered a beta project, we are no longer invite only; and registration codes are sent immediately upon registering your interest on the website.

It's been a long time coming; but we are just a few weeks away from completing our implementation of the Presence server; after which friend requests and game invites will work just like back in the day!

ares

The best way to keep up to date with ares is to read the news articles/release notes over at the website.

The last time I spoke about ares on Patreon we were at v124; as we have currently launched v133 there has been a lot of changes in this time. The most of which being that at time of writing we are quite possibly one of the most accurate Nintendo 64 emulators currently available; our contributors have spent an immense effort hardware testing and ensuring all improvements are hardware correct, and we can finally run some traditionally hard to run games without issue; and more importantly, without any hacks.

ares currently supports the emulation of 27 systems, 17 of which are considered among the best emulators for those platforms, which is quite an impressive achievement considering all emulator cores are custom; developed by the ares team and not based on existing emulators *although the Nintendo 64 core does make use of Parallel-RDP.

As for the future of ares? I am currently working on fleshing out Sega Saturn emulation, that will be made available once it is able to run games successfully. Near always expressed an interest in emulating the Sega Saturn; in fact, that is why ares has a Sega 32X core; to make sure the SH2 processors could be accurately emulated before moving on to the rest of the hardware; unfortunately, Near was not available to finish this work, but we (the ares team, and myself) plan on honouring this wish and bringing Sega Saturn emulation to ares: attached is an early screenshot of ares running the Sega Saturn bios; ugly and incomplete at this time, but things are starting to come together!

As always, thank you for your continued support for my work on video game preservation and emulation.

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