Status Update - October 2021 (Patreon)

Hello! Like last year, October hosts Hacktoberfest - an event encouraging people to contribute to open source projects. I took part in it, so this month's work mostly consists of somewhat random contributions.

RPCS3

• Set up VS environment before calling cmake in glslang and spirv - This makes VS use its own cmake instead of the one in PATH, if available. Thus, dependencies can now be built without cmake in PATH.

DuckStation

• Implement image verification - PR implementing a previously inactive "Verify Dump" feature, allowing the user to compare their image hashes against a Redump database.
• Fixup IsValidPSExeHeader - a minor fix to Duckstation's PSEXE verification routines. Due to a minor bug, Duckstation could falsely treat some malformed binaries as valid.

Cxbx-Reloaded

• Simplify timers - PR partially reversing my timer changes from last year and simplifying them, retaining full functionality. Since publishing the initial PR I learned of a better way to scale timers without the risk of overflow, so I applied this newfound knowledge to Cxbx-Reloaded.

xemu

• Improve Unicode filename handling on Windows - my first contribution to xemu fixes my pet peeve. xemu had issues with UTF-8 paths treated as ANSI (mostly by its qemu parts), so in this PR I addressed all Unicode issues I could find. Now xemu should work fine with non-ASCII paths.

OpenRCT2

• FIx Scenario description missing when loading a park from a save file - Saved games do not have a valid info chunk, so scenario names/descriptions did not load.
• Fix Breakpad crash dumps are created in the game directory - fix for a regression that made OpenRCT2 unable to create crash dumps if it was installed in a write-protected directory (like Program Files).
• Fix Object Selection not tearing down objects properly - Fixes "images were not freed" assertions when messing with the Object Selection, or at least two possible ways of getting it.

Other

The highlight of this month is the cheat releases for numerous PS1 and PS2 games. Just like in September, I released an entire pack of cheats, this time concentrating mostly on improving controls in games such as Gran Turismo or NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona. I published a writeup on all cheats together with the release:
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2021/10/09/console-codes-pack-2/