35 ms·

Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

78 points by theBashShell 6y ago

lawl 6y ago
I'm starting to think leaking the code for an old console could be a pretty cost-effective way to get an emulator. I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before.
- thiagocesar 6y ago
  Microsoft already has a pretty sophisticated Xbox emulator, deployed to both Xbox360 and XboxOne.
  - als0 6y ago
    It's a shame that they whitelisted such a small selection of titles (on 360).
    - caseyjones29142 6y ago
      I think that's more of a licensing things really. Some of those old games had really wierd diels especially for music rights.
      - CivBase 6y ago
        I never understood why music publishers care so much about licensing for old games. Are they worried people are going to put on GTA3 to avoid buying a couple songs? It makes more sense to me that playing old games would encourage those song sales.
      - als0 6y ago
        Before your comment I thought the more likely reason that Microsoft qualifies games is to reduce the amount of development and support effort needed for their emulator. Even Halo 1 struggled to get some good framerates, IIRC.
      - thiagocesar 6y ago
        That’s the reason why some games keep going in and out of Steam. Especially console ports such as Alan Wake.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      At least it’s easy to patch out if you have a homebrew-enabled 360.
      - als0 6y ago
        I'm curious to know how well unsupported titles work.
        Lammy 6y ago
        Boom: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uU9j4X-WK01UZuZzv6FuDkYakmkke2X9rB14j2n4YRw https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uU9j4X-WK01UZuZzv6Fu...
        als0 6y ago
        Amazing, thanks! Seems like a rock solid emulator.
  - deelowe 6y ago
    Is it actually an emulator or something more akin to WINE?
    - thiagocesar 6y ago
      Considering Xbox360 used a PowerPC CPU, some emulation had to be done. Not sure about the Xbox One - it might be just a different aspect on the hypervisor.
- cdolan 6y ago
  You may be thinking of Nintendo. They packaged up a Super Mario ROM from the internet and sold it on their classic games store. https://youtu.be/zR1uEwjx7VI https://youtu.be/zR1uEwjx7VI
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I believe they wrote their own emulator though.
  - nolok 6y ago
    Sony "PS Classic" is also an arm board running ePSXe.
  - jsmith45 6y ago
    That proof is utter nonsense. Sure Nintendo might have just downloaded the rom, but they may have: 1) just concatenated the prg and chr roms and added an iNES header so they could validate in third party emulators. (Likely extra helpful for games where they were developing anti-epilepsy patches, since third party emulators have some really nice debugging tools.) or 2) Used a third party cart dumper that adds the iNES header, because it was faster and easier than setting up a 3.5 inch floppy drive to try read the original rom from the archive. (And much faster than retyping in hex dump printout from the archive).
    - thristian 6y ago
      or 3) hired one of the iNES developers to develop their emulator, who kept using the file-format they were familiar with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156
      - woodrowbarlow 6y ago
        great detective work there!
- mrfredward 6y ago
  The 20KB stripped down Windows kernel that shipped on the XBox isn't hard to emulate...emulators such as CXBX do this for many functions by calling the respective windows function on the host. Low-level emulators (XQemu) take the opposite approach by emulating well understood hardware (hdd, cdrom, usb) and then running a binary dump of the xbox firmware (which contains the kernel, it's not on disk) directly. To my understanding the hardest problem in XBox emulation is the GPU, and unfortunately this doesn't help with that.
- woodrowbarlow 6y ago
  a bunch of nintendo console code leaked earlier this month as well, including the code for the gamecube. any big emulator project that wants to maintain legitimacy is going to stay far away from these leaks. they'll send out messages on mailing lists warning developers NOT to look at the code and NOT to go fixing bugs based on the leaked code. an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation. if an emulator suddenly gets way better after a leak, it's going to draw some legal attention. almost makes you wonder if it's a honeypot...
  - badRNG 6y ago
    > an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation And this is why it is often done on completely legitimate open source projects, and many projects don't shy away from doing so. Wine, ReactOS, and many more regularly do so completely legally. (of course there was that thing in '06... https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-source-code-review/ https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...)
    - woodrowbarlow 6y ago
      that reactOS kerfuffle is just one of many, many examples of how a tainted clean-room design can completely derail an open-source project, and most stories have a nastier ending than that one. the dolphin emulator team (gamecube/wii emulator) made a statement on the nintendo leaks: https://twitter.com/Dolphin_Emu/status/1257051968045899776 https://twitter.com/Dolphin_Emu/status/1257051968045899776
  - boudin 6y ago
    I don't think it is a honey pot, but you do make a valid point around the grey legal area to even read the code. The linux directx module that microsoft pushed earlier this week might not even get code reviewed because of the risk of reading patented interfaces that could taint the developers future work: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-DXGKRNL-Uphill-Battle https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...
- Unklejoe 6y ago
  > I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before. I know at least Sony uses PCSX ReArmed for their "PlayStation Classic".
BruceEel 6y ago
What if a Microsoft developer gets her/his hands on the leaked NT 3.5 code and secretly starts working on setting Windows 10 straight...
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Little chance of that. They still haven't even fixed the start menu search. I open up the start menu, type 'vlc', and get no matches. I close the menu, reopen it, and try again. This time, it finds VLC no problem. They've had almost 5 years to fix this.
  - BruceEel 6y ago
    sobering...
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    The most annoying thing in Windows 10 is the damned file explorer jumps three seconds after you have just opened it and clicked on a folder. Makes you have to reposition the view a second time.
    - jaywalk 6y ago
      I've never seen this before.
  - lutte 6y ago
    What mystifies me is that the core of the OS is actually pretty good. I've never had any issue like a blue screen since a decade ago. The kernel and driver subsystems are rock solid. Had a few occasional GPU driver crashes but those are mostly the fault of the driver devs and they don't cause a system reboot since Vista. Why is the userland so bad in comparison? are they employing much worse developers to take care of the windows explorer/search/browser side of things? it is true that if you really try to pay attention you will notice many quirks and bugs here and there in the user interface interactions, with the start menu search being such a horribly visible offender (also bugs in the explorer search box). Microsoft managed to make a uniform looking user interface for both win9x and XP/Vista/7, why are they having so much trouble with Windows 10 control panels?
tinus_hn 6y ago
Didn’t the NT code leak more than 10 years ago already?
- icegreentea2 6y ago
  That would be the partial W2k and NT 4 leak mentioned in the article? This dump seems to be full code + full build environment, which seems pretty extraordinary.
- hestefisk 6y ago
  That was NT 4.0 and 2K. There’s an awesome /. post here: https://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-windows-nt-4-source-code-leaks https://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-win...
skookum-skuad 6y ago
Who cares? I had the full NT 5/W2k codebase and have seen the NT 4 codebase. 3.5x is such a Windows Vista between 3.1 and 4.0.
saddlerustle 6y ago
Trash article. The Xbox code leaked in 2004 and was passed around extensively. You can find public download links from even ~2010. This was discussed in the popular 2005 CCC talk: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591-paper_xbox.pdf https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591... The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. XQEMU hasn't "struggled to emulate the original Xbox OS and kernel" - it's a low level emulator and thus just emulates the Xbox hardware with no knowledge of the OS.
- temac 6y ago
  > The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. From the whole Win2k obviously not, and it is common for journalists to not be very precise, but at least the kernel seems to have tons of architectural similarities with the NT kernel, and I would not be surprised if it was a derivative? https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel I also found https://books.google.fr/books?id=-8YlaRclj2gC&lpg=PA603&pg=PA603#v=onepage https://books.google.fr/books?id=-8YlaRclj2gC&lpg=PA603&pg=P... and that's pretty much what I expected. But nobody who knows the difference about kernel vs. whole windows OS think that they would take explorer.exe and random obscure IT stuff and so over, and 150k is not crazy big, but for a core OS kernel this is completely expected. The high level API seems to be based on a subset of DirectX and even a few pieces of Win32, so that's not completely unrelated either. It's obvious that the GUI was not taken from Windows, that you won't be able to maybe install a printer and so over, and it is probable that tons of custom code was also written, but that does not make the relationship disappear completely.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    The scheduler is radically different and that has knock-on effects on the rest of the OS. The OS gets a fixed time slice every frame before control is handed back to the game. The security model is engineered to distrust the user of the device as an anti-piracy measure. It might be a derivative, but calling at a “custom version of Windows 2000” is absolutely wrong.
projektfu 6y ago
I'm trying to think of a good use case for exploring the NT 3.5 source code but I can't really think of one. It had the Windows 3 user interface and a number of enterprisey things like telephony (TAPI) and UPS control, but was overall pretty bare-bones. I remember a few quirks. I lacked a CD drive and borrowed one to install NT 3.51. When I gave the CD drive back, NT wouldn't boot. It turns out that it installs ATAPI.SYS if you have a CD, which won't boot without it. It installs ATDISK.SYS if you don't have a CD. System administration was pretty clumsy. I really began to appreciate the text file based UNIX philosphy over the point-and-click Microsoft approach. I had been dual booting NetBSD and OS/2 2.1 before that. Nonetheless it was solid compared to Windows 3.1 and 95. Perhaps being limited to what it was, it'd be easier to study the native api and how it was being accessed by the several subsystems (Win32, OS/2, POSIX). A much lighter version of NTFS was running on it. I remember at the time you needed a windows source license to write a filesystem driver. I was using Visual C++ 4.0. 100Mbit ethernet was fast for the time and I was a little jealous of people using 155Mbit ATM.
HerbsMan 6y ago
Where is the xbox code?
win35nt 6y ago
I'd love to try and have a go at compiling the NT3.5 source. What tools would I need? There are Makefiles and things in the archive, but having installed MS Visual C++ 6.0 in a Windows 2000 virtual machine, it still seems to be lacking commands like "build" and "nmake" which are referenced in these files... Does anyone have pointers?
Jfgcshdhdbuehs 6y ago
Where source of windows nt 3.5,and source of xbox?
Jfgcshdhdbuehs 6y ago
Where source of windows 3.5,and source of xbox?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

78 points by theBashShell 6y ago

lawl 6y ago

I'm starting to think leaking the code for an old console could be a pretty cost-effective way to get an emulator. I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before.

thiagocesar 6y ago
Microsoft already has a pretty sophisticated Xbox emulator, deployed to both Xbox360 and XboxOne.
- als0 6y ago
  It's a shame that they whitelisted such a small selection of titles (on 360).
  - caseyjones29142 6y ago
    I think that's more of a licensing things really. Some of those old games had really wierd diels especially for music rights.
    - CivBase 6y ago
      I never understood why music publishers care so much about licensing for old games. Are they worried people are going to put on GTA3 to avoid buying a couple songs? It makes more sense to me that playing old games would encourage those song sales.
    - als0 6y ago
      Before your comment I thought the more likely reason that Microsoft qualifies games is to reduce the amount of development and support effort needed for their emulator. Even Halo 1 struggled to get some good framerates, IIRC.
    - thiagocesar 6y ago
      That’s the reason why some games keep going in and out of Steam. Especially console ports such as Alan Wake.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    At least it’s easy to patch out if you have a homebrew-enabled 360.
    - als0 6y ago
      I'm curious to know how well unsupported titles work.
      - Lammy 6y ago
        Boom: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uU9j4X-WK01UZuZzv6FuDkYakmkke2X9rB14j2n4YRw https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uU9j4X-WK01UZuZzv6Fu...
        als0 6y ago
        Amazing, thanks! Seems like a rock solid emulator.
- deelowe 6y ago
  Is it actually an emulator or something more akin to WINE?
  - thiagocesar 6y ago
    Considering Xbox360 used a PowerPC CPU, some emulation had to be done. Not sure about the Xbox One - it might be just a different aspect on the hypervisor.
cdolan 6y ago
You may be thinking of Nintendo. They packaged up a Super Mario ROM from the internet and sold it on their classic games store. https://youtu.be/zR1uEwjx7VI https://youtu.be/zR1uEwjx7VI
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I believe they wrote their own emulator though.
- nolok 6y ago
  Sony "PS Classic" is also an arm board running ePSXe.
- jsmith45 6y ago
  That proof is utter nonsense. Sure Nintendo might have just downloaded the rom, but they may have: 1) just concatenated the prg and chr roms and added an iNES header so they could validate in third party emulators. (Likely extra helpful for games where they were developing anti-epilepsy patches, since third party emulators have some really nice debugging tools.) or 2) Used a third party cart dumper that adds the iNES header, because it was faster and easier than setting up a 3.5 inch floppy drive to try read the original rom from the archive. (And much faster than retyping in hex dump printout from the archive).
  - thristian 6y ago
    or 3) hired one of the iNES developers to develop their emulator, who kept using the file-format they were familiar with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156
    - woodrowbarlow 6y ago
      great detective work there!
mrfredward 6y ago
The 20KB stripped down Windows kernel that shipped on the XBox isn't hard to emulate...emulators such as CXBX do this for many functions by calling the respective windows function on the host. Low-level emulators (XQemu) take the opposite approach by emulating well understood hardware (hdd, cdrom, usb) and then running a binary dump of the xbox firmware (which contains the kernel, it's not on disk) directly. To my understanding the hardest problem in XBox emulation is the GPU, and unfortunately this doesn't help with that.
woodrowbarlow 6y ago
a bunch of nintendo console code leaked earlier this month as well, including the code for the gamecube. any big emulator project that wants to maintain legitimacy is going to stay far away from these leaks. they'll send out messages on mailing lists warning developers NOT to look at the code and NOT to go fixing bugs based on the leaked code. an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation. if an emulator suddenly gets way better after a leak, it's going to draw some legal attention. almost makes you wonder if it's a honeypot...
- badRNG 6y ago
  > an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation And this is why it is often done on completely legitimate open source projects, and many projects don't shy away from doing so. Wine, ReactOS, and many more regularly do so completely legally. (of course there was that thing in '06... https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-source-code-review/ https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...)
  - woodrowbarlow 6y ago
    that reactOS kerfuffle is just one of many, many examples of how a tainted clean-room design can completely derail an open-source project, and most stories have a nastier ending than that one. the dolphin emulator team (gamecube/wii emulator) made a statement on the nintendo leaks: https://twitter.com/Dolphin_Emu/status/1257051968045899776 https://twitter.com/Dolphin_Emu/status/1257051968045899776
- boudin 6y ago
  I don't think it is a honey pot, but you do make a valid point around the grey legal area to even read the code. The linux directx module that microsoft pushed earlier this week might not even get code reviewed because of the risk of reading patented interfaces that could taint the developers future work: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-DXGKRNL-Uphill-Battle https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...
Unklejoe 6y ago
> I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before. I know at least Sony uses PCSX ReArmed for their "PlayStation Classic".

BruceEel 6y ago

What if a Microsoft developer gets her/his hands on the leaked NT 3.5 code and secretly starts working on setting Windows 10 straight...

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Little chance of that. They still haven't even fixed the start menu search. I open up the start menu, type 'vlc', and get no matches. I close the menu, reopen it, and try again. This time, it finds VLC no problem. They've had almost 5 years to fix this.
- BruceEel 6y ago
  sobering...
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  The most annoying thing in Windows 10 is the damned file explorer jumps three seconds after you have just opened it and clicked on a folder. Makes you have to reposition the view a second time.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    I've never seen this before.
- lutte 6y ago
  What mystifies me is that the core of the OS is actually pretty good. I've never had any issue like a blue screen since a decade ago. The kernel and driver subsystems are rock solid. Had a few occasional GPU driver crashes but those are mostly the fault of the driver devs and they don't cause a system reboot since Vista. Why is the userland so bad in comparison? are they employing much worse developers to take care of the windows explorer/search/browser side of things? it is true that if you really try to pay attention you will notice many quirks and bugs here and there in the user interface interactions, with the start menu search being such a horribly visible offender (also bugs in the explorer search box). Microsoft managed to make a uniform looking user interface for both win9x and XP/Vista/7, why are they having so much trouble with Windows 10 control panels?

tinus_hn 6y ago

Didn’t the NT code leak more than 10 years ago already?

icegreentea2 6y ago
That would be the partial W2k and NT 4 leak mentioned in the article? This dump seems to be full code + full build environment, which seems pretty extraordinary.
hestefisk 6y ago
That was NT 4.0 and 2K. There’s an awesome /. post here: https://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-windows-nt-4-source-code-leaks https://slashdot.org/story/04/02/12/2114228/windows-2000-win...

skookum-skuad 6y ago

Who cares? I had the full NT 5/W2k codebase and have seen the NT 4 codebase. 3.5x is such a Windows Vista between 3.1 and 4.0.

saddlerustle 6y ago

Trash article. The Xbox code leaked in 2004 and was passed around extensively. You can find public download links from even ~2010. This was discussed in the popular 2005 CCC talk: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591-paper_xbox.pdf https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591... The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. XQEMU hasn't "struggled to emulate the original Xbox OS and kernel" - it's a low level emulator and thus just emulates the Xbox hardware with no knowledge of the OS.

temac 6y ago
> The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. From the whole Win2k obviously not, and it is common for journalists to not be very precise, but at least the kernel seems to have tons of architectural similarities with the NT kernel, and I would not be surprised if it was a derivative? https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel I also found https://books.google.fr/books?id=-8YlaRclj2gC&lpg=PA603&pg=PA603#v=onepage https://books.google.fr/books?id=-8YlaRclj2gC&lpg=PA603&pg=P... and that's pretty much what I expected. But nobody who knows the difference about kernel vs. whole windows OS think that they would take explorer.exe and random obscure IT stuff and so over, and 150k is not crazy big, but for a core OS kernel this is completely expected. The high level API seems to be based on a subset of DirectX and even a few pieces of Win32, so that's not completely unrelated either. It's obvious that the GUI was not taken from Windows, that you won't be able to maybe install a printer and so over, and it is probable that tons of custom code was also written, but that does not make the relationship disappear completely.
- klodolph 6y ago
  The scheduler is radically different and that has knock-on effects on the rest of the OS. The OS gets a fixed time slice every frame before control is handed back to the game. The security model is engineered to distrust the user of the device as an anti-piracy measure. It might be a derivative, but calling at a “custom version of Windows 2000” is absolutely wrong.

projektfu 6y ago

I'm trying to think of a good use case for exploring the NT 3.5 source code but I can't really think of one. It had the Windows 3 user interface and a number of enterprisey things like telephony (TAPI) and UPS control, but was overall pretty bare-bones. I remember a few quirks. I lacked a CD drive and borrowed one to install NT 3.51. When I gave the CD drive back, NT wouldn't boot. It turns out that it installs ATAPI.SYS if you have a CD, which won't boot without it. It installs ATDISK.SYS if you don't have a CD. System administration was pretty clumsy. I really began to appreciate the text file based UNIX philosphy over the point-and-click Microsoft approach. I had been dual booting NetBSD and OS/2 2.1 before that. Nonetheless it was solid compared to Windows 3.1 and 95. Perhaps being limited to what it was, it'd be easier to study the native api and how it was being accessed by the several subsystems (Win32, OS/2, POSIX). A much lighter version of NTFS was running on it. I remember at the time you needed a windows source license to write a filesystem driver. I was using Visual C++ 4.0. 100Mbit ethernet was fast for the time and I was a little jealous of people using 155Mbit ATM.

HerbsMan 6y ago

Where is the xbox code?

win35nt 6y ago

I'd love to try and have a go at compiling the NT3.5 source. What tools would I need? There are Makefiles and things in the archive, but having installed MS Visual C++ 6.0 in a Windows 2000 virtual machine, it still seems to be lacking commands like "build" and "nmake" which are referenced in these files... Does anyone have pointers?

Jfgcshdhdbuehs 6y ago

Where source of windows nt 3.5,and source of xbox?

Jfgcshdhdbuehs 6y ago

Where source of windows 3.5,and source of xbox?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]