Friday, March 11, 2005 - Posts

How CherryOS works even though its written in VB6...

Well after finding that the maincherryos.exe file is written in vb6 I knocked up Spy++ and looked around...

Well the GUI is actually a MDI Application, each child form as a picturebox that (from an educated guess) executes the process and sets the parent tobe the picturebox (achieved nicely with SetParent API after working out the hWnd of the ProcessID that you shell... See Example here). those buttons in the main GUI are custom written user-controls with bitmaps (hence why it wieghs in at 1.6xMB) and that little cherry stick thing on the bottom right is another picturebox (use an Image next time!).

So if *you* feel like taking what great work the PearPC developers have done and write a VB6 front end that makes it “easier” for a n00b to use a VM then feel free to draw up some inspiration from this sample.

If I get time I might even write up a gui front end like CherryOS for CherryOS.exe or ppc.exe... just replace the CherryOS.exe file with a custom written EXE that shows what teh commandline parsed is and there... you have a ripped emulator!

posted Friday, March 11, 2005 5:59 PM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

HOLY MOLY! CherryOS main EXE is written in VB6 :O

Welll today's my day off (and it better stay that way!) so i thought I'd go look at CherryOS, first thing I noticed was that it was *just* as laggy as PearPC which may sound like an insult to PPC but infact its not. PPC is still in development where as CherryOS is meant to be of  “release quality”... so i began playing around with some of the files that CherryOS comes with using my favourite PE tool PE Explorer...

Cherry OS ships with these files (executable)

CherryHD.exe - (Console) Possibly to make HD Images?
CherryOS.exe (Console) possibly where the actual emulation takes place
MainCherryOS.exe (Win32) Which is where the GUI front end is (so all the wizards etc)

looking trhough i was suprised to see MainCherryOS.exe have an imports from VB6's runtime file (msvbvm60.dll) and heres a pretty picture to proove it. now hangon a minute, what company who writes “Virutal Machine” software would use VB in there as well? Surely they'd use something closer to the metal and yet integral to the rest of their product (Eg. a C++ Compiler)? I'm a big fan of VB and think alot of it, but theres something you just *dont* do with VB, and one of them is include a GUI front end for a VM product (Imagine VirtualPC used VB as the GUI, or VMWare!)

I'm still sniffing around, so any subseqent discoveries will be posted in a new article...

posted Friday, March 11, 2005 4:56 PM by wsoftware with 1 Comments

Xbox 2 Details released (MS Press Release)

Well Microsoft are hard at work on Longhorn, Whidbey, Yukon, Office 12, Istanbul (Office Live Com Client) and if that wasnt enough theres also our dearly beloved Xbox 2 console and XNA! The details MS have released on Xbox 2 I've snipped from the main press release.

The next-generation Xbox hardware design principles include the following:

  • A well-balanced system that will deliver more than a teraflop of targeted computing performance
  • A multicore processor architecture co-developed with IBM Corp. that provides developer "headroom" and flexibility for the HD Era
  • A custom-designed graphics processor co-developed with ATI Technologies Inc. designed for HD Era games and entertainment applications

In addition, familiar software technologies such as DirectX, PIX, XACT and the recently announced XNA Studio -- an integrated team-based development environment tailored for game production -- complement the new hardware to help game developers unlock increasingly powerful and complex silicon.

The HD Era gaming platform will strike an elegant balance of hardware, software and services to power the new experiences consumers demand. Games and entertainment features such as the next-generation Xbox guide represent a shift toward more immersive and integrated consumer experiences. This shift will be further illustrated by a significant leap to high-definition graphics, where character movements and expressions are intensely vibrant and nearly indiscernible from real life; by multichannel, positional audio fidelity so clear and precise that players will be able to hear the faintest enemy footsteps sneaking up behind them; by richer online communications; and by an abundance of on-demand content for game consoles.

So the term “HD-Era Games” gets trickled into the marketting jargon now, with hardware like multi-core (is that more than 2?) processor and GPUs from ATI I'm sure this is going to happen (lots of multi-threaded engines...) with the computing power this beast will have... but damm.... it feels only like last year I bought my xbox and already its obsolete (okay so I had it since a few days before it was launched in Australia but it feels new still)...

Think Toy Story, Shrek style graphics on your Plasma screen whilst fragging your friends ass on UT 200x.... Hail to the king baby! (duke)

UPDATE: See the XNA site for some cool shots and download the HiRES Assets from GDC 2005:-)

posted Friday, March 11, 2005 3:18 PM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

ATI Catalyst v3.5 & Multimedia Center v9.06 Released!

Its been a while since the last Catalyst but the newest from ATI has just been released.

From the last time I visited ATI (a while ago) they seem to have updated their support pages, so take a look at the new KB based site here where you'll find the download links for Catalyst 5.3 and MMC 9.06!

If your lazy and have XP heres the download links for Catalyst v5.3 and MMC v9.06.

posted Friday, March 11, 2005 2:53 PM by wsoftware with 0 Comments