Status Update - June 2022

Hello! First of all, I apologize for the delay in publishing this post, I was on a trip and didn't get to writing the update a week ago.

This month I "only" released a single cheat-code-based mod and a tool, but I also did some investigation that I'm going to briefly mention.

Main releases:

Triggers control scheme for Test Drive Unlimited (PS2)

TDU, other than its PC and X360 versions from Eden Games, has also received surprisingly competent PS2 and PSP ports from Melbourne House. Unfortunately, those ports don't give us an option to retain a "modern" controls scheme with accelerate/brake mapped to triggers, but turns out it was almost considered at one point. In this cheat code for PCSX2, I re-enable an unused controls scheme that maps accelerate/brake to bumpers (L1/R1), and swap them with triggers.

The cheat can be downloaded here: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/test-drive-unlimited-ps2/ 

TDUModTools

When researching the above, I needed a way to reliably repack the game's archive files exclusive to the PS2/PSP versions of TDU. While their format was mostly known, the existing tools were not finished enough and they could not deal with the string hashes present in the archive. With this in mind, I created my own MHPF unpacker/repacker as a part of a new TDU Mod Tools repository:
https://github.com/CookiePLMonster/TDUModTools 

Other work:

OpenRCT2

• Remove any traces of WinNT5.1 - OpenRCT2 ditched Windows XP/ReactOS a while ago, but the code still contained references to it and code paths exclusive to those targets. This PR removes them from the code entirely.

ModUtils

ModUtils received more updates based on the (dev) user feedback. More to come soon!

PCSX2

• Updater: Making it fancier - a PR submitted in late May but merged later in June, improving the visual aspect of a new PCSX2's updater. For a detailed list of changes, please refer to the PR itself.
• GameDB: Port the Midnight Club 3 patch to NTSC-U v2.00 - refraction's T-Bit patch for the NTSC-U version of Midnight Club 3 (non-Remix) was made only for v1.04. This PR ports the patch to v2.00.
• XInput: Fix axis inversion when using SCP extensions - Default bindings didn't match between XInput and XInput SCP - both analog sticks were vertically inverted. This PR fixes the issue.

Dolphin

• Make shader precompilation interruptable - a huge outlier this time. I submitted this PR to Dolphin in November 2019, and this week it finally got merged! With this change, the initial shader compilation can be canceled and Dolphin shuts down as soon as it safely can, while previously it'd continue precompilation in the background.