Gauntlet Dark Legacy [MW-014] [1.03]

[PatrickvL]

Issues:

• In-game in latest builds (April 2017)

From @ObiKKa on April 9, 2017 19:1

Thanks to PR #331 (Apr 8-9, 2017?) & #334 (Apr 9-10?) I can see several stages of intro screens, a long and lovely cinematic movie, the menus and finally in-game graphics in its currently broken status. Others are welcome to test this game in the future.

Interesting notes:

• The intro movie (CG-animated) is rendered on only a quarter of the screen at the moment. The same is true with another movie when you exit in-game back to the main menu.
• The tutorial cutout screens in-game are garbled so I cannot read anything, therefore do not know what to do in the first level.
• Many effects and shading stuff are missing (Shown as garbled). The menus are not fully coloured and look a bit corrupted.

I tried to get in-game as quickly as possible on the second go to keep the kernel file small but then had to trim off much of the fluff. Xbe_(2017-04-10).txt KrnlDebug_(2017-04-10_Trimmed).txt

Copied from original issue: Cxbx-Reloaded/Cxbx-Reloaded#335

[PatrickvL]

From @ObiKKa on April 9, 2017 19:5

Ah, that was then (6.5 years ago). Wow they look virtually similar! http://shogun3d-cxbx.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/gauntlet-dark-legacy.html

[PatrickvL]

From @BenNottelling on April 9, 2017 19:10

It's good they are similar, that means the emulator hadn't really made any backwards steps

[PatrickvL]

Dxbx, back in 2010 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWlmKP74LuY

[PatrickvL]

To get menu's and in game graphics in a readable state would require better support for palletized textures then what we have right now. The Dxbx run I linked to above, used an approach that we can strife for in Cxbx too: conversion of textures at drawing time (as that's the most suitable moment to combine active palettes with active textures)

[PatrickvL]

From @ObiKKa on April 9, 2017 21:16

Yes. I've just now taken a look at that channel's old recorded DXBX videos from nearly 6.5 years ago. Here's also the intro, menu and game video of that game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27mnsM-n-GU It was uploaded 2 days before the above video which fixed stuff.

[PatrickvL]

Yeah, it's my channel so I know about that ;)

[krikic]

Now the textures of this game see better,but yet go slowly the game

The state is working now

[haekb]

Small regression, not sure when it was introduced. Here's hopefully relevant info! Xbe.txt KrnlDebug.zip

Also running this on debug mode in VS2017 with remote debugging tool installed generates multiple access violations pretty much every second.

[RadWolfie]

Also running this on debug mode in VS2017 with remote debugging tool installed generates multiple access violations pretty much every second.

@haekb Multiple access violations every seconds are actually handled by LLE by the way. We're using Windows' exception handler to handle the LLE code. You can ignore it for now.

[Kalen6]

Hey there, I'm entirely new to Xbox emulation and CXBX, but they've been very interesting to familiarize myself with. It's almost July 2020, and upon attempting to emulate my Gauntlet: Dark Legacy .xbe file, it would seemingly work perfectly for about 10-20 seconds, before displaying "Received Fatal Message: Failed to create vertex buffer", and then force-closing the emulation. I'm on Windows 10, Intel processor, AMD graphics. Please let me know if there is a solution to this crash, or any way I can assist the community on this issue. Cheers!

[PatrickvL]

The same issue was reported a few months back, but thanks for re-testing this. (I asked @LukeUsher to look into the vertex buffer cache, which seems to be overflowing.)

[Margen67]

@Lethalbanana626 Piracy isn't allowed.

[Lethalbanana626]

Hi i noticed an issue, I dont know if its just me but whenever i load the game, the intro plays just fine, but once I get to the start screen my frames drop tremendously and it makes it basically unplayable. I just wanted to bring light to this issue because on the compatability list is says it is playable but for me it is not. I also tried another game to see if I had issues with framerate but it just seems to be this game. Help plz

[PatrickvL]

The slowness during gameplay is a known issue : it's because this game uses palletised textures, which aren't available on Windows, so we have to convert them. This takes a lot of processing power, not because of the conversation itself (which is rather trivial), but because of the continuous hashing to test whether a texture needs to be updated.

I've tried performing the palette lookup in the pixel shader, which kinda works but produces artifacts that can't be solved easily. So we're stuck with the current approach for now

[Lethalbanana626]

Ok, well I hope we'll be able to find a solution for it in the near future. thanks for the response!