Xbox 360 test build 6 (November 14)

Xbox 360 test build for November 14. We need your help testing: there's a short list below, and each item tells us whether tonight's fixes work on a real console. Once the bugs are ironed out, it becomes the next 360 release.

What's new since test build 5 (November 13)

• 343 Guilty Spark, The Library and Keyes no longer draw black. The levels with fog over the screen cleared the whole picture instead of just the fog layer. Fixed for both renderers.
• High shadows fixed. Shadow resolution 1024 blacked out the screen because the console's video memory had no room for it. The shadows now draw at 512 instead, and port.txt says so.
• A gamma setting, display.gamma, for matching the brightness of the original Xbox. See test 6.
• Audio thread. The sound mixer runs on a hardware thread of its own now. When a dropout happens, the audio line in the log says whether mixing took too long or the thread didn't get to run.
• GPU buffer fix for the dark wedges, the trails from the top-left corner and the warped reticle. The game rewrote vertices the GPU was still drawing. Now it waits or uses other memory. The emulator never showed this bug, so your console is the real test (test 1).
• Builds from current main again, with all of this week's Chupathingy changes.

Install

Unzip and copy the Warthog folder over your old one. Keep your maps and Delta link files. New installs need an RGH/JTAG 360 or a softmod like BadUpdate or BadAvatar, plus the maps from your own copy of Halo in the maps folder. There are no game files in this zip.

The zip has a ready-made config.toml (also attached on its own below), with the test settings turned on and comments that explain them. It goes next to default.xex. If your old config.toml has changes you want to keep, back it up first, or copy the three test lines into yours.

What to test

1. Blood Gulch, two minutes: drive a Warthog, fire a plasma weapon at walls, watch the reticle. Do you still see the dark wedges, the trails from the corner or the warped reticle?
2. Audio dropouts: play the same thing once with reverb = true and once with reverb = false (in config.toml). Upload debug.txt after each run.
3. The Pillar of Autumn: skip the opening cutscene with A, then press X to leave the cryo tube. Do you get out? Is part of the tube dark, and if so, where were you looking?
4. Halo (b30): if the crash on the beach happens, copy port.txt off the console right after, before you start the game again.
5. 343 Guilty Spark and The Library: do they draw now?
6. Gamma: try display.gamma from 1.6 to 2.0. Which value looks most like the original Xbox on the same TV?
7. Settings: change a setting in the game, save, reboot the console. Did it stick?

How to report

Upload debug.txt (and port.txt for test 4) at https://dump.chupathingy.org and post the code in #bug-reports on the Discord. Say which test it's for (the number above) and what you saw. A photo helps for anything drawn wrong. Ideas are welcome in the ideas channel, but for this build bugs come first.

Known issues

• In the Pillar of Autumn's cryo tube, a dark shape can fill part of the view when you look toward the tube's edge. We're still looking into it (test 3 helps).
• We haven't confirmed yet that settings save across a reboot (test 7).
• The beach crash on Halo hasn't happened in the emulator, so we need your log to find it.
• The assault rifle can look like chrome. That bug is shared with the other builds and being worked on.
• The shader cache in this zip came from the last build, so a few new shaders get compiled the first time they're needed, which can cause a short hitch.
• display.renderer = "native" is still a test.

The config.toml was added to the zip after the build. Nothing else in the zip changed.

Built from d94fd80 (the game at ChupathingyCE/chupathingyce@01f386a)
SHA-256 of chupathingy-360-test-20261114.zip: bfd77181bf11066c9db155ca7d3b81b389e65ce07479e8213b0a2a7d89333150

Xbox 360 test build 5 (November 13)

Xbox 360 test build for November 13. This one is for play testing: please play it and report bugs (crashes, freezes, visual or sound bugs, stutters). Once the bugs are ironed out, it becomes the next 360 release.

What's new since test build 4 (November 11)

• The shaders come with the build now. Before, the 360 built each shader the first time it was needed, which caused hitches, mostly in the campaign. This should make first runs a lot smoother.
• Fewer graphics calls per draw, which should help the frame rate.
• The game is caught up to today's Chupathingy, including the fix for The Pillar of Autumn's cryo tube that wouldn't open.

Install

Unzip and copy the Warthog folder over your old one: the new default.xex, shader_cache.bin and the shaders folder. Keep your config.toml, maps and Delta link files. New installs need an RGH/JTAG 360 or a softmod like BadUpdate or BadAvatar, plus the maps from your own copy of Halo in the maps folder. There are no game files in this zip.

What to try

Turn on the frame log first: put perf_log = true under [console] in config.toml. Most of what we need is in those lines.

1. Blood Gulch for two minutes: drive and shoot. Tell us your fps, and anything drawn wrong (missing or odd-looking things) compared to the last build.
2. The Pillar of Autumn from the start: does the cryo tube open, and does the look and crouch tutorial run through? Is the right half of the screen black while you stand in the tube?
3. Shader check: in the frame log from The Pillar of Autumn, the "shaders made" number should be at or near zero. If it isn't, or the game stutters on the way in, tell us.
4. Big maps (The Silent Cartographer, Infinity): fps, heat, crashes.
5. If you see wedges, streaks from the top-left corner or a warped reticle, send a photo and the log from that moment.

Report bugs

Upload port.txt, debug.txt and logs\debug.txt at https://dump.chupathingy.org and post the code in #xbox-360 on the Discord, with what you were doing. Ideas are welcome in the ideas channel, but for this build bugs come first.

Built from 626c882
SHA-256 of chupathingy-360-test-20261113.zip: 0e2b154bea20651b26a3d70a2370898f5448b7c103fbee55ea3e7d7bdfcad742