Windows Media Center
You know, i’d like to have a game museum available. For the kids, for me: as a former game developer i’m utterly *delighted* to be able to run all the past games on (so many) abandoned platforms… Because sometimes fun is still there, nice game mechanics ARE eternal…
Anyway for the last 30 years, that’s a lot of video games to reference and play, hence the need of a good frontend.
And why not using MS MediaCenter (MCE) ?
That program is cool, not *great*, it does not support emulation, but still, really cool.
Therefore we need to develop a plugin dedicated to mass-gaming. Fortunately MSoft provides a SDK. But… Wait… Did someone really tried to develop with such as thing ? It’s terrible, everything has to be done from scratch for strange reasons, because it’s flawed by design. Samples, public interfaces, resources, everything is forbidding you to access the LookNFeel of MCE: so, reinvent the wheel from scratch, or pass your way… Apparently.
Until 2 things:
Reflector : a MSIL disassembler, and decompiler , add an AddIn to batch decompile a complete assembly: all the MediaCenter sources at the palm of your hand.
and
ResTuner to extract the MCML resources from DLL/EXE. Hence MCML files (Markup files needed to design MCE interfaces), or ResourceExtract, NirSoft or Alonis Resource Extract
Now 5Mo of C# code and MCML sources files to browse…
Reverse engineering at its best…
Leave a message if you need details about this.
Cheers Awen
