windows.h without NOMINMAX be like

“hippity hoppity words min and max are my property”

But enough talk, meow at you!

Similarly how SilentPatch and the WidescreenFix fixes various bugs and adds improvements, mine does as well.

As a matter of fact, I used to maintain ThirteenAG’s WFP for NFS. Now I’m focused on my own thing mostly. (Forked it off of it but barely any of the code is left lol)

It’s called NFS-MultiFix. (I made one ages ago in 2017 for ProStreet but I’m reviving the project now).

It’s a going to basically be an all-in-one thing. So, from basic things like a widescreen fix, to the added ability to change resolutions of environment maps and shadows, fixing clipped/popin shadows in Undercover, fixing crashes, fixing some crap gameplay features, resizable windowed mode, etc. Basically, making it a version of the game that it deserves to be on PC.

It’s a genuinely pretty massive set of fixes spanning over 80 cpp/hpp files with about 500 lines of code on average. I made sure to optimize every nitty-gritty and I ended up with a smaller DLL size than the average widescreen fix while adding so many more features.

I also have a design rule in place - it must do its best effort to work in every possible version of the game without crashing. This includes demo versions of the same games. (This sadly doesn’t count DRM but nothing I can do about that)

That being said, I am currently focused on ProStreet (as I’m also the main coder in Team Pepega for the Pepega Mod) and I hope to make a release within the next year. It should be available for every Black Box NFS on PC (except The Run and World)

If you wanna check out what I made so far, check out the Reformed mod for Undercover. I made an exclusive release for those guys because frankly, Undercover is the worst one out of the bunch (in terms of code).

Silent is a real cool dude. I’ve interacted with him directly and he’s always been helpful.

I assume the code was closed only because it was a bit of a hodge podge he had to clean up. (Well, that and the GTA modding scene is a bit, uh, toxic, to say the least)

I’m currently in a similar position for Black Box NFS games. It’s taken me over a year so far and I’m still not fully satisfied to release anything because there’s so much code to span over 6 (similar, but different) games.

But… that’s Master Chief from Halo and not Solid Snake…

Although he can also do Solid Snake.

That was Gianni Matragrano, the one who runs the channel.

He is an excellent voice actor.

I probably misremembered something then, 390xx it is then.

But whatever it may be it is in the AUR 100%.

For PSP development, PPSSPP can be very good if configured correctly and you know how to use it.

You can debug on a PSP using psplink but compared to PPSSPP it’s a nuisance to do it every single time. Plus, using a GUI debugger is way nicer anyway.

What really fascinated me was Sony’s approach. For all intents and purposes, it was on par with the PS2 or even better (because of more memory).

Yeah sure, the VUs coupled with the GS throughput were better for graphics processing than the Media Engine in the PSP, but the devil is in the details.

But unlike the PS2, it has a real OS that is capable of loading modules and even do some fake multitasking! This was groundbreaking for the time and this is what made it so magical for homebrew IMO.

It’s very good.

Basically, there is one maintainer in the AUR (the name escapes me, jonathon I think it was?) who applies the necessary patches to the old NVIDIA drivers to make them run with a modern Linux kernel.

Of course, there won’t be any Wayland support, but the experience is acceptable as long as you temper your expectations in terms of graphics API support. (No vulkan sadly)

I hadn’t used it myself but I know a person who does and loves it. iGPU handles Wayland stuff while the NVIDIA is there for the heavy lifting in Xorg.

Unironically, the best bet for them is nvidia 540xx drivers on the AUR with an LTS kernel.

Yes, both Yuzu and Ryujinx were open source.

Ryujinx is licensed under MIT and Yuzu is under GPLv3.

Chart

I need to remind some people here who don’t seem to understand something.

Forks may be dead and development may not be as fast as the original.

However - you must think about the future and not the situation right now. Yuzu and Ryujinx sources will be invaluable information for people making emulators later down the line.

It’s a matter of when and not if someone picks it up again.

There go my hopes and dreams of IRL Solid Vision system and duel disks…

One day, it will happen with MR.

RIP Black Box Games

(I’m a NFS fan but also a fan of Black Box)

The way I did it is by trying to solve more and more advanced problems with simpler tools/features, then looking at more advanced features and seeing where they could be applied to make the problem solving simpler. Rinse and repeat.

An easy example that I can remember is making arrays that dynamically expand. I started with the barebones malloc and worked out how to use std::vector (and other list types) in its place.

Understanding that concept is, what I believe, to be the foundation of learning programming.

I’m no pro whatsoever, but using this method really helps me pick up and learn new languages.

Oh you mean Android Studio automagically “updating” your versions so that your build breaks and you spent 3 hours figuring out what just happened without you even touching anything?

Oh cool, I didn’t know!

I’ll go check it out, thanks!

I want to try to use Rust myself as well to build a library and I wonder how it’ll turn out (especially since I do Win32 hacks mostly lol).

No problem. Please do report back!

We really do not have many (if any) Rust alternatives for code hooking and injection and doing stuff with rendering like we do with C++.

Maybe you could finally figure something out we can use for other games as well!

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not familiar with Rust nor Hearthstone at all, but I do deal with D3D9 and D3D11 on Windows to do similar things. Hopefully this will give you insights how you could approach this. (Closest I’ve done was code injection on Android)

The most common and robust approach to this is to hook/detour the API functions that the game imports from the renderer backend.

One way you usually do this is by creating a dummy library which overrides/intercepts the system library and passes through every function call to the API, except for the ones you need, you’d put your code before/after the passthrough. This usually requires you to gather all exported symbols and re-create them, which is a very tedious but rewarding task, as it usually is very stable and can work around things such as DRM.

Usually, since that sits quite low on the application’s code stack, it is most efficient for it to be a more general-purpose hook which can load other libraries. Examples would be things like the ASI loader or Reshade on Windows.

Another way would be to do code injection via library side-loading. Essentially, you can simply load a library that performs the code hooks and does necessary renderer API hooking. This is usually done in combination with the previous method (it being a “plugin” loader), however, it is also possible to modify game binaries to call dlopen to load your library and its exported function as an entrypoint (in which case you need to do platform’s CPU assembly code for a bit).

Those are the entrypoints for your code. After that, it is all about necessary render backend code that you need to do in order to draw graphics/text/etc.

In C/C++ land I’d just tell you to use Dear ImGui, but seeing as that doesn’t exist for Rust, you’re kinda on your own.

Same with the API detouring. Ideally, you’d make a plugin loader that does the job for you. Not sure if that exists in Rust yet.

For references, Vulkan overlays such as MangoHUD or ReShade could be useful to help you figure out how to draw stuff on screen.

As for the rest of your code - it can run in a separate thread that does the job for you as the game runs. Or, make a client-server relationship and make the game hook be the server for your info that you need.