Discussion

Interview: How ReXGlue is bringing the Xbox 360 into the static recompilation era

andrewstuart: What is Xbox 360 recompilation?

fwip: 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.

giancarlostoro: The blog post reminds me of similar efforts with Shockwave. There's people building decompilers, and runtimes, and if you join enough Discords, you will notice the people in them are cross-contaminating between communities if you will, they share insights with one another, in their efforts towards specific goals. They're hyper focused on making one game or another come back. There's Habbo Hotel, and Coke Studios, as well as other games.The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs

YesBox: 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).

Venn1: These projects are really neat. Last week, I was able to build (and play) the Xbox 360 release of Sonic Unleashed on a couple of ARM SBCs using Sonic Unleashed Recomp.

asdff: Crazy that it has taken so long. I understand these are small teams trudging off in the dark but you could have imagined there would have been more eyes on this and hands tinkering in the time when the Xbox 360 was being sold than today. Right at that same time in history the iPhone was getting cracked basically every iOS release, sometimes by teenagers. Seems like there were a ton of hackers around back then.

triangleman: What's the latest on homebrewing on the actual Xbox 360 these days?

opan: 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.