Significant progress made on Xbox 360 recompilation

I have a lot of respect for little communities where people gather to work obsessively over a goal like this. It's fun to see projects like this that would never see this much effort applied if not for the passion of a few dedicated people.

Many of the smartest people I've known got their starts in little communities like these: Obsessively learning new things that would normally be beyond their academic or career level because they need to know something advanced to move their passion project forward.

I'm indirectly involved / hear about a project that buys up old feature phones, mainly from Japan, to try and find ones that have data for old imode games on them, notably a FFVII spinoff called Before Crisis. It's difficult because they would release the game in separate data packs, the idea being people can remove data packs for parts of the game they already played to save space (also a feature on modern smartphone games). But since the servers are long gone, they need to find phones with the data on them to extract it.

But they've made really good progress in recent years, to the point that the game is now playable. Not sure if it's complete, but it's playable. See e.g. https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/work-begins-on-restor... for info.

Where can I boot up Coke Studios? Enjoyed that game as a kid, including making music (which was so friggen cool! They had tons of samples you could just drag and drop into a timeline).

Edit: fun memory. I figured out how scamming works at some point. IIRC (and I may not) I set up a minigame in my studio, and contestants had to give me their furniture to participate in a game. Since furniture could stack weirdly, people made all sorts of crazy mazes that were actually quite difficult to navigate due to the fixed isometric perspective.

Each stage required handing over a more expensive item than the last. At some point someone handed over a super rare/expensive piece of furniture.

Not gonna erase that. ACTUALLY I think I figured out how to clone items due to a bug. Or mine infinite DBs. Used that as cover to get someone to give me their item. Was a long time ago.

Anyways, a user handed me their super rare item and I then gave them a stern warning on how this is a common scam and I just stole their item(s). Then I handed everything back over to them and they profusely thanked me. lol

> cross-contaminating between communities if you will

The positive term for this is cross-polinating

Was playing that last night. So many great recomps lately. Ty for the newsletter

How does the static recompiler handle self modifying code?

btw any way to reach out to you (twitter, discord?). big fan of your blog. I'd say on par with Time Extension!

Static code. Also, very fine details of the machine because less important.

When emulating a NES (for example), you really have to emulate every register, how registers change, and also weird effects like instructions that take longer to read or write values, as games rely on that stuff. Once you have modern systems where much of the code was originally C, it becomes less important to ensure every register has exactly the right values when a subroutine finishes in most cases, you can rely that (most) of the code follows standard calling conventions.

It's a combination of things. The floodgates were opened when the N64 recompiler popped up a couple (?) of years back. Really got interest going.

I also think tooling got better, and with the advent of AI engineering it made all of this a lot more accessible.

It depends on the platform you're targeting.

Something like a SNES will always have the same hardware no matter what (okay, leave out the expansion chips inside cartridges, or fold them into "same hardware").

Something like a PC will have any old random shite you care to plug into it.

Something like an Xbox 360 is kind of halfway between.

With a SNES you can rely on the fact that a vertical blanking interrupt will happen 50 times a second no matter what, and you get so many instructions before your video output is halfway down the screen no matter what, and then if you want to play silly games like changing a PPU register to dick about with the screen mode you can. You have to take into account things like it taking more time for certain types of memory access like if you cross a 256-byte page boundary, but since when you get down this far you're doing it all in assembler you can place your code and data exactly where you want to get exactly the behaviour you want.

When you emulate this, you must emulate every aspect of this behaviour correctly or things will fall apart. Think about things like the "open bus bugs" that trip up emulation - some games rely on silly tricks like expecting the capacitance on the pins of the chips to hold a value like a crazy single-byte DRAM for a moment while they look somewhere else. If your emulator just goes "okay no devices are enabled so the bus is simply pulled high to 0xff" that will fail.

With a PC you've got a wider variety of hardware, and a deeper level of abstraction. You don't have to care about flipping registers at just the right time, you just throw some textures and polygons at the GPU and let it do its thing. It'll tell you when it's ready for more. This is why you get the same experience between your AMD GPU, your NVidia GPU, your Intel GPU, and hell why not just have software OpenGL too (because it's slow but that's how we used to do it in the olden days).

So if you wanted to run a SNES game on modern hardware you'd be better off emulating the hardware directly, bugs and all, and then running the "real" game binary.

But if you wanted to run something like an Xbox 360 game - written using "modern" development techniques, where a lot of the hardware is abstracted away behind drivers and libraries - you might well just break it down into functional blocks of code, rewrite them for your native CPU, and shim the calls to the libraries to talk to the ones you have on your native system.

A bit of code that rotates a set of vertices and flings them at the GPU will look pretty much the same in C on any platform, but it'll compile to very different assembly language. That's okay though! If you understand how the instructions relate to the data you can just kind of translate one set of opcodes to another and expect it to be more-or-less right. You can even (kind of) do this automatically!

You take an Xbox game designed to run on an Xbox 360, a 64 bit PowerPC system and decompile its binaries back into source code. You now have the ability to modify the game as well as port it to other systems and architectures such as Windows on X86_64 or Linux on ARM64.

You take a binary that's intended to run on the Xbox 360, and emit a new binary that runs on a modern x86 computer.

Windows and Linux run on the same x86 CPU architecture, you don't need to recompile anything. What WINE does is to translate/replace system calls and libraries.

You can play game backups, use unofficial HDDs at bigger sizes, send over new games with FTP, use third party and DIY controllers like GuliKit's offerings or a Flatbox leverless arcade controller. You can play a modded version of Rock Band 3 with all the songs from all the games, using a Wii Guitar Hero controller with a Pi Pico-based adapter in place of the Wiimote. Any game you installed from disc for faster load times becomes playable without the disc in automatically once you get Aurora running (this is pretty cool, on some other modded consoles like PS4 you'd have to reinstall the games another way).

As far as homebrew in the sense of people making their own games and applications, I don't know that there's much going on. Maybe you can find a controller tester app. Sadly the 360 scene has a lot of proprietary stuff going on, and uses some official dev SDKs, IIRC. Where 3DS and Switch modders have everything on GitHub and freely licensed, 360 has a lot of binary-only releases on random forums and such. It would probably be a major effort to change this and involve rewriting stuff people already know and love.

I did the the RGH 3 mod to half a dozen or so 360s a few years back for myself and friends. If you just wanna play games with modern comforts, things are in a pretty good state. We don't need to worry about the original disc drives, HDDs, or controllers wearing out and making the console useless, we can replace or avoid them all. The wireless card is also easily replaceable, a friend of mine had one that seemed non-functional after he spilled some Mtn Dew all over his 360 back in the day. Everything else seemed good after a clean but I just got him a new wireless card off eBay and swapped that out.

If anyone wants to get into this and doesn't already have a 360, the S models are easiest to mod and most reliable (no RRoD). Some are Trinity and some are Corona motherboards inside, but both are hackable. Corona may need a post-fix adapter, but they're cheap and easy to install. Just avoid the E series.

For modding tutorials, MrMario2011 on YT is great.

There is also a software-only exploit that's a bit worse but more accessible. It came out after I already did all my modding, so I haven't got experience with it.

Most people just want emulation which was solved a while ago. Recompilation is mostly for modders which is a very small community.