12 ms·

Halo 2 in HD: Pushing the Original Xbox to the Limit

471 points by campuscodi 2y ago

iBotPeaches 2y ago
I do really wish the era of Xbox & Halo 2 modding returned in modern times. I owe that point in time to my career choice and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes. Now consoles blow e-fuses and prevent downgrades on top of tons of other security enhancements. Was a great read and trip back in time. Pair this with projects like Insignia launching Halo 2 support and its a great time for classic Halo 2.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?
  - MegaDeKay 2y ago
    It is a stretch to call it just a PC built from COTS hardware. The NV2A GPU was a modified version on the NV20 and included the Northbridge. The MCPX Southbridge was custom. The DVD was customized for anti-piracy. The CPU is a (slightly) customized PIII. If it was all COTS, the XBox XEmu emulator would be further along than it is now. https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/ https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/
    - muziq 2y ago
      Didn’t the SouthBridge turn up in some Nvidia ATX boards ? I recall positively salivating on realising that one particular Nvidia motherboard gave us a hardware encoded Dolby digital signal, just like the Xbox..
      - justsomehnguy 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles
        muziq 2y ago
        [dead]
- Chabsff 2y ago
  It's worth pointing out that what you are fondly remembering from a consumer standpoint was an absolute nightmare from the publishers', and not just for pure greed, though that definitely plays a role. Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards. Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities. People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money. Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.
  - bri3d 2y ago
    I've never heard of a parent being concerned about console mods, of all things, and I (as a parent) don't really buy this angle. The original Xbox's weak parental controls could be bypassed by pressing X Y Left Trigger X, a tidbit that was quickly distributed throughout my middle school to let everyone launch M-rated Halo discs. Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that. Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway. DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.
- Jerrrry 2y ago
  >and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. this is pretty much the only unanimous, uncontroversial absolute statement that can be made in the context of online gaming
  - piltdownman 2y ago
    Starcraft as the first eSport Game? WoW as the first mass appeal Western MMORPG? PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? Minecraft for defining a demographic as much as a genre? Dark Souls, Journey or Nier:Automata for redefining what actually constituted the role of 'online gamer' ? The path from Quake or Perfect Dark -> Halo 2 was no great paradigm shift compared to the five above imo
    - cbdumas 2y ago
      > PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? As I recall, H1Z1 actually came out before PUBG (though it has since faded into obscurity). A quick search on Wikipedia seems to back that timeline[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Developmen...
      - sickofparadox 2y ago
        Wasn't H1Z1 a knockoff of DayZ first, which then pivoted to the Battle Royale format after the success of PUBG?
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    What novelty did Halo 2 introduce? At a high level, it is just another shooter preceded by all sorts of experiments: Quake, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, etc. Sure, it had tons of polish and was on consoles, but I never thought of it as genre defining.
    - Jerrrry 2y ago
      > was on consoles > genre defining you walked right past it
- ravenstine 2y ago
  For better or worse, in a lot of ways, I think the last decade of developers have done a lot to kick the ladder out from underneath them. One of the reasons I'm a software engineer today is because I could easily examine webpages to see how they work, tinker with the memory of programs, open up hardware to see what's inside (relatively low risk of destroying the device), and so forth. And yeah, back in the day of Halo PC, modding the levels taught me a lot about what goes into the game. Knowing what a "BSP" is can be a pretty useless piece of trivia, but it made me feel smart and capable of understanding more. It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering. Software is way harder to crack/debug today; certainly not impossible, but the barrier of entry is much higher. Plus there's a ton of moving parts that go into getting software to work securely on not just mobile but modern desktops, adding another layer of hassle. You can still examine what a webpage is doing, but even that has changed significantly; so many websites today are div soup (yes, worse than in the early 2000s) to support JavaScript monstrocities that are also minified and obfuscated. When it comes to games, you can almost forget it in some cases because they're so heavily dependent on content streaming from servers. As far as hardware goes, you've either got to face various security hoops that can brick devices, use a heat gun to unglue the bezels on certain things, and face a lot more risk in permanent damage. All of these changes were made for a reason, but we've also taken the fun out of everything. Even game modding really wasn't what it used to be in spite of some of the tools available today technically being better than those in the past.
  - coldpie 2y ago
    I agree with your concern, but I'm quite happy to see what's going on in the retro emulation & decompilation/reverse-engineering scenes[1]. A lot of that is being done and is driven by "the kids". It's an appealing, easy, and low-risk entry point for newer developers who want to dive into low level stuff, and it even has a bit of a "fuck the man" bent to it, which is fantastic. You're right that the environment is different from what we grew up with, it was always going to be. But I think the kids will find their own way. [1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.
- Zardoz84 2y ago
  Modding it's pretty alive on PC.
- huntedsnark 2y ago
  > Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Some things Halo 2 had off the top of my head that aren't related to gameplay: - Matchmaking. Almost all games at the time made you manually join lobbies, and now we take matchmaking for granted. - Persistent party. You'd invite your friends to your party and then start the match-making process. During the whole process you could chat with your friends, and when the game ended, you were still a party and could talk to each other. - Chat. Everyone had an Xbox Live headset which came with the service. So everyone was a participant of party chat, in-game team chat, and even "proximity chat" with the enemy. With Halo 2's chat systems + Xbox Live headset ubiquity, it was a highly social game. - Split screen online. All of the above worked with playing with a friend in split screen. Your friend could come over and you could start Team Slayer matchmaking in split screen which was awesome—the game would have to find two more teammates—, and your guest could even chat. Something that could never be done on PC really. These dominated the old "look for and join the server" model of past FPS and, frankly, I could never go back to that. Gameplay wise, Halo 1 had most of the innovations that Halo 2 capitalized on but Halo 2 moved to the pure shield-is-your-health-bar system and removed health packs. After each battle you didn't have this scramble for a health pack just to get ready for the next confrontation, so the pacing was better than arena shooters imo. Finally, Halo 2 didn't need to be the global first on each bullet point to be innovative. But it was probably the first game to have all these in one package. There was a lot of UX polish in setting this standard which you can tell because most games don't reach it even today.
    - babypuncher 2y ago
      A lot of people lament the death of community run dedicated servers, but I'm with you here. I don't miss trying to find a good deathmatch UT04 server that wasn't either super high ping, loaded to the hilt with obnoxious mods, or stuck running Rankin 24/7, only to give up after 40 minutes.
- DonnieBurger 2y ago
  I still play Halo 2 on PC all the time, multiplayer included. There's an active community thanks to Project Cartographer: https://halo2.online/home/ https://halo2.online/home/
  - AgentME 2y ago
    It's also still officially supported and popular through the Halo Master Chief Collection which is available on Steam.
  - MarkyC4 2y ago
    (not to be demeaning, but) Why? Halo 2 is playable, with first party support, via The Master Chief Collection today. They've even kept the button combinations (BXR, RRX, etc)
- deleted 2y ago
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- giantg2 2y ago
  "and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time." I think we can all agree it's multiplayer was better than the current halo infinite.
  - wsc981 2y ago
    I never player Halo 2 multiplayer, but both me and my brother loved Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer. Was awesome back in the day (I played it on a Mac, by brother probably on a PC). In my opinion it was the best FPS that I played, I'd put it above Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Doom & Marathon. However, at some point it seems there were many aimbots in the game, which ruined the gameplay for me.
- Larrikin 2y ago
  I think this ignores the fact that technology will continue to march on and that the tinkering at the cutting edge will always allow for fun stuff. In the time period you talk about modding consoles and games was hacking on the cutting edge. Before that you had the phone phreakers and even before that you had people who were seriously into radios. I think its already happening with the current crop of LLMs, generative AI, and just all the various ML models that have been developed that and another generation has already started doing the same. Right now they are attempting to keep that locked behind corporate doors but we already have Llama locally thanks to a leak. Thats to say nothing of the budding AR that is also coming. The idea of putting goggles on my head with a computer that makes up the story, graphics and projects them onto the real world would have sounded crazy to me when I was knocking people out of AOL chat rooms with a concon.
colesantiago 2y ago
Is there any reason why there are comments are in there, it would be nice if the functions were self documenting. Other than the comments being distracting making the code hard to read, this is a great deep dive blog post which is very technically impressive.
selectodude 2y ago
This is going to come off as overly cynical - it's a very cool project. But are you really pushing the original Xbox to the limit when you replace and overclock the CPU, increase RAM, add solid state storage, and overclock the GPU? It's not really an Xbox at that point.
- settsu 2y ago
  Whether it's an Xbox is arguable, but for the purposes of the topic and the post, you're mostly arguing semantics. If one were to "push a Honda Civic to the limits" with an array of engine and suspension modifications, for purposes of discussion you're going to sound like you're just splitting hairs by asking "Is it really still a Civic, tho??", even if you could be technically correct. The author has the right to title their content as they desire and you can just rewrite it as "Modding the OG Xbox to within an inch of its life" in your head...
  - Sardtok 2y ago
    If the only original parts of the car, are the chassis, I would say it's not really a Honda Civic anymore.
    - MadnessASAP 2y ago
      I'm going to rely on ol' Thseuses ship here and say that as long as you started with a Honda Civic, you get to call it a Honda Civic.
- Ericson2314 2y ago
  I think using the same motherboard counts for something
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > But are you really pushing the original Xbox to the limit This is in the context of XBox modding, where “original Xbox” should be interpreted to mean “not an XBox 360”. Halo 2 can run at higher resolutions on a 360, so clarifying that this was a modding project on the original Xbox is helpful. You have to read it in context. It’s not literally about an unmodded Xbox, it’s a modding project and the target for the mods was an original Xbox.
deleted 2y ago
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orliesaurus 2y ago
that's a lot of work... wow - interesting that your friend "doom" didnt want to reveal themselves
- echelon_musk 2y ago
  It's almost certainly grimdoomer.
  - dako2117 2y ago
    yes https://x.com/grimdoomer/status/1780260482718573055?s=61&t=0T8ysTPQFP96cc79SwUY4Q https://x.com/grimdoomer/status/1780260482718573055?s=61&t=0...
  - amatecha 2y ago
    grimdoomer is the person who wrote the article
  - landr0id 2y ago
    Grimdoomer wrote the article but doom is a different person -- and he's not exactly anonymous. I'm not sure what the other commentator was implying.
- nxobject 2y ago
  Not that it's our place to take speculation seriously, or speculate at all – but I _plausibly_ imagine working in an industry where I'd think twice before connecting my real-world identity to XBox reverse-engineering, just to be on the safe side.
- 867-5309 2y ago
  Doom9 sprung to mind
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bearjaws 2y ago
1. Resolders RAM to upgrade from 64mb to 128mb of vram 2. Solders new CPU onto console only to discover its gpu bottle necked 3. Enables OCing the GPU on the original Xbox, only to run into memory bandwidth limits 4. Reverse engineers Halo 2 source code to set scaling to 720p or 1080p (output is interlaced to 1080i) 5. Speeds up the hard drive to faster load in textures My god this man is more dedicated to Halo 2 than Bungie is to any of their IP today.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- strictnein 2y ago
  > My god this man is more dedicated to Halo 2 than Bungie is to any of their IP today Bungie isn't involved with Halo at all any more. Microsoft owns the IP and it's developed by 343 Industries. Bungie has Destiny/Destiny 2 now and the upcoming Marathon extraction shooter.
  - MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Most D2 players flat out don't trust Bungie anymore. Not only have they been mailing in their seasonal content for years now, but their last campaign was abysmal. Taking an extra 6 months on development won't change things. I've got a group of 12 friends who all have been playing since alpha. One has purchased the next expansion, and nobody else is even considering it. I'm relieved to finally be done with it, personally.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      As someone who watched their friend play through Destiny 1 for hundreds of hours, I don't know what anyone was expecting? That game clearly did not respect it's players and their time or money, yet still made insanely good profits, so why would they do anything different? Remember how much they paid Peter Dinklage for his voice acting, and his character sounded absolutely phoned in, and lazy, to the point that they eventually had to replace it with much better voice acting by someone else who was cheaper
alex3305 2y ago
[flagged]
- aprilnya 2y ago
  also don’t love the sidebar taking up like 1/4 of the screen on mobile lol
- jccalhoun 2y ago
  The site was terrible. Reader view didn't work for me it just turned it into a blank page. I had to open up inspector and change the css rules to read it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
seanf 2y ago
Link to the video from the bottom of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_nk21389u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_nk21389u8 The video includes side-by-side comparison between the original upscaled 480p and 720p. Around 7:00 you hear about what it takes to get 720p and maintain around 30fps gameplay. Not only a great article, but also a great video to summarize the changes needed get the higher resolution.
Lammy 2y ago
> I often get comments saying “[720x480]’s not not a 16:9 resolution” or “that’s not real 480p”, but “480p” encapsulates a range of resolutions and aspect ratios and 720×480 is the resolution the Xbox considers to be 480p (so take it up with Microsoft, not me…). Take it up with some ITU dudes in the 1970s actually: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf “The February 1980 note further suggested that the number of samples per active line period should be greater than 715.5 to accommodate all of the European standards active line periods. While the number of pixels per active line equal to 720 samples per line was not suggested until the next note, (720 is the number found in Rec. 601 and SMPTE 125), 720 is the first value that “works”. 716 is the first number greater than 715.5 that is divisible by 4 (716 = 4 x 179), but does not lend itself to standards conversion between 525-line component and composite colour systems or provide sufficiently small pixel groupings to facilitate special effects. Arguments in support of 720 were provided in additional notes prior to IBC in September 1980. […] As noted above, Rec. 601 provided 720 samples per active line for the luminance channel and 360 samples for each of the colour-difference signals. When the ITU defined HDTV, they stipulated: ‘the horizontal resolution for HDTV as being twice that of conventional television systems’ described in Rec. 601 and a picture aspect ratio of 16:9. A 16:9 picture ratio requires one-third more pixels than a 4:3 picture ratio. Starting with 720, doubling the resolution to 1440 and adjusting the count for a 16:9 aspect ratio leads to the 1920 sample per active line defined as the basis for HDTV [9]. Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1920 x (9/16) = 1080. Progressive scan systems at 1280 pixels per line and 720 lines per frame are also a member of the ‘720-pixel’ family. 720 pixels x 4/3 (resolution improvement) x 4/3 (16:9 aspect ratio adjustment) = 1280. Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1280 x (9/16) = 720. Therefore, most digital television systems, including digital video tape systems and DVD recordings are derived from the 4:2:2 basic standard format. The 720 pixel-per-active-line structure became the basis of a family of structures (the 720-pixel family) that was adopted for MPEG-based systems including both conventional television and HDTV systems.”
- bestham 2y ago
  I thought DVD only supported 4:3 anamorphic video with non square pixels for the correct playback aspect ratio.
Agingcoder 2y ago
That’s pretty sophisticated - kudos to the author. I love this.
rationalfaith 2y ago
[dead]
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
Other than "hacker spirit" (which is completely legitimate), is there a reason you'd want to play Halo 2 this way—going through the effort of modding your console to add memory and overclock the gpu—instead of playing the PC version?
- jimmywetnips 2y ago
  I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say no
- qwerty456127 2y ago
  Whenever an old device is supposed to be unsuitable for doing something it usually feels great to use it for just that, proving it's well capable or even better. This probably is a psychological disorder (usually mild and fun to have though) - an opposite counterpart of obsession with being among the first to buy the newest model of the most popular gadget. Both give a sense of superiority :-)
  - Narishma 2y ago
    It's not really the old device anymore when you have to upgrade memory, CPU and GPU.
    - qwerty456127 2y ago
      This is subjective. I personally always loved upgrading the hell out of old PC (install the maximum possible memory and CPU after patching the BIOS and soldering the socket, add a SATA card to a computer which only had IDE etc).
      - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
        I feel like there's something different between doing this to a PC, which is in some sense designed to be upgraded, and doing this to a game console.
        2y ago
randomopining 2y ago
Why would you waste your time doing this?
Arrath 2y ago
FTA: "The tag data system is designed to be as flexible and performant as possible, and, in my opinion the inner workings are really a feat of engineering. I could write an entire blog post about the inner workings of the tag data system and why I think it makes the Blam engine one of the most flexible engines ever made, but that isn’t relevant to this post." I would love to read this article if it ever gets written.
- tehsauce 2y ago
  If you have written something like this somewhere, or know someone that has, please share!
- tiptup300 2y ago
  me too I was into halo 2 modding when I was young and knew very little programming at all. the concepts there blew my mind, almost, I was too green to follow how it worked even to start. it was so dynamic I fundamentally didn't understand how something could be like that. how could a player position be within the same context as a weapon that had configurations and then effects themselves were in that same list. a lot of the stuff I'm interested in very much circles around these same concepts.

471 points by campuscodi 2y ago

I do really wish the era of Xbox & Halo 2 modding returned in modern times. I owe that point in time to my career choice and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes. Now consoles blow e-fuses and prevent downgrades on top of tons of other security enhancements. Was a great read and trip back in time. Pair this with projects like Insignia launching Halo 2 support and its a great time for classic Halo 2.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  It is a stretch to call it just a PC built from COTS hardware. The NV2A GPU was a modified version on the NV20 and included the Northbridge. The MCPX Southbridge was custom. The DVD was customized for anti-piracy. The CPU is a (slightly) customized PIII. If it was all COTS, the XBox XEmu emulator would be further along than it is now. https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/ https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/
  - muziq 2y ago
    Didn’t the SouthBridge turn up in some Nvidia ATX boards ? I recall positively salivating on realising that one particular Nvidia motherboard gave us a hardware encoded Dolby digital signal, just like the Xbox..
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles
      - muziq 2y ago
        [dead]
Chabsff 2y ago
It's worth pointing out that what you are fondly remembering from a consumer standpoint was an absolute nightmare from the publishers', and not just for pure greed, though that definitely plays a role. Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards. Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities. People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money. Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.
- bri3d 2y ago
  I've never heard of a parent being concerned about console mods, of all things, and I (as a parent) don't really buy this angle. The original Xbox's weak parental controls could be bypassed by pressing X Y Left Trigger X, a tidbit that was quickly distributed throughout my middle school to let everyone launch M-rated Halo discs. Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that. Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway. DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.
Jerrrry 2y ago
>and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. this is pretty much the only unanimous, uncontroversial absolute statement that can be made in the context of online gaming
- piltdownman 2y ago
  Starcraft as the first eSport Game? WoW as the first mass appeal Western MMORPG? PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? Minecraft for defining a demographic as much as a genre? Dark Souls, Journey or Nier:Automata for redefining what actually constituted the role of 'online gamer' ? The path from Quake or Perfect Dark -> Halo 2 was no great paradigm shift compared to the five above imo
  - cbdumas 2y ago
    > PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? As I recall, H1Z1 actually came out before PUBG (though it has since faded into obscurity). A quick search on Wikipedia seems to back that timeline[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Developmen...
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      Wasn't H1Z1 a knockoff of DayZ first, which then pivoted to the Battle Royale format after the success of PUBG?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  What novelty did Halo 2 introduce? At a high level, it is just another shooter preceded by all sorts of experiments: Quake, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, etc. Sure, it had tons of polish and was on consoles, but I never thought of it as genre defining.
  - Jerrrry 2y ago
    > was on consoles > genre defining you walked right past it
ravenstine 2y ago
For better or worse, in a lot of ways, I think the last decade of developers have done a lot to kick the ladder out from underneath them. One of the reasons I'm a software engineer today is because I could easily examine webpages to see how they work, tinker with the memory of programs, open up hardware to see what's inside (relatively low risk of destroying the device), and so forth. And yeah, back in the day of Halo PC, modding the levels taught me a lot about what goes into the game. Knowing what a "BSP" is can be a pretty useless piece of trivia, but it made me feel smart and capable of understanding more. It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering. Software is way harder to crack/debug today; certainly not impossible, but the barrier of entry is much higher. Plus there's a ton of moving parts that go into getting software to work securely on not just mobile but modern desktops, adding another layer of hassle. You can still examine what a webpage is doing, but even that has changed significantly; so many websites today are div soup (yes, worse than in the early 2000s) to support JavaScript monstrocities that are also minified and obfuscated. When it comes to games, you can almost forget it in some cases because they're so heavily dependent on content streaming from servers. As far as hardware goes, you've either got to face various security hoops that can brick devices, use a heat gun to unglue the bezels on certain things, and face a lot more risk in permanent damage. All of these changes were made for a reason, but we've also taken the fun out of everything. Even game modding really wasn't what it used to be in spite of some of the tools available today technically being better than those in the past.
- coldpie 2y ago
  I agree with your concern, but I'm quite happy to see what's going on in the retro emulation & decompilation/reverse-engineering scenes[1]. A lot of that is being done and is driven by "the kids". It's an appealing, easy, and low-risk entry point for newer developers who want to dive into low level stuff, and it even has a bit of a "fuck the man" bent to it, which is fantastic. You're right that the environment is different from what we grew up with, it was always going to be. But I think the kids will find their own way. [1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.
Zardoz84 2y ago
Modding it's pretty alive on PC.
huntedsnark 2y ago
> Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Some things Halo 2 had off the top of my head that aren't related to gameplay: - Matchmaking. Almost all games at the time made you manually join lobbies, and now we take matchmaking for granted. - Persistent party. You'd invite your friends to your party and then start the match-making process. During the whole process you could chat with your friends, and when the game ended, you were still a party and could talk to each other. - Chat. Everyone had an Xbox Live headset which came with the service. So everyone was a participant of party chat, in-game team chat, and even "proximity chat" with the enemy. With Halo 2's chat systems + Xbox Live headset ubiquity, it was a highly social game. - Split screen online. All of the above worked with playing with a friend in split screen. Your friend could come over and you could start Team Slayer matchmaking in split screen which was awesome—the game would have to find two more teammates—, and your guest could even chat. Something that could never be done on PC really. These dominated the old "look for and join the server" model of past FPS and, frankly, I could never go back to that. Gameplay wise, Halo 1 had most of the innovations that Halo 2 capitalized on but Halo 2 moved to the pure shield-is-your-health-bar system and removed health packs. After each battle you didn't have this scramble for a health pack just to get ready for the next confrontation, so the pacing was better than arena shooters imo. Finally, Halo 2 didn't need to be the global first on each bullet point to be innovative. But it was probably the first game to have all these in one package. There was a lot of UX polish in setting this standard which you can tell because most games don't reach it even today.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    A lot of people lament the death of community run dedicated servers, but I'm with you here. I don't miss trying to find a good deathmatch UT04 server that wasn't either super high ping, loaded to the hilt with obnoxious mods, or stuck running Rankin 24/7, only to give up after 40 minutes.
DonnieBurger 2y ago
I still play Halo 2 on PC all the time, multiplayer included. There's an active community thanks to Project Cartographer: https://halo2.online/home/ https://halo2.online/home/
- AgentME 2y ago
  It's also still officially supported and popular through the Halo Master Chief Collection which is available on Steam.
- MarkyC4 2y ago
  (not to be demeaning, but) Why? Halo 2 is playable, with first party support, via The Master Chief Collection today. They've even kept the button combinations (BXR, RRX, etc)
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giantg2 2y ago
"and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time." I think we can all agree it's multiplayer was better than the current halo infinite.
- wsc981 2y ago
  I never player Halo 2 multiplayer, but both me and my brother loved Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer. Was awesome back in the day (I played it on a Mac, by brother probably on a PC). In my opinion it was the best FPS that I played, I'd put it above Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Doom & Marathon. However, at some point it seems there were many aimbots in the game, which ruined the gameplay for me.
Larrikin 2y ago
I think this ignores the fact that technology will continue to march on and that the tinkering at the cutting edge will always allow for fun stuff. In the time period you talk about modding consoles and games was hacking on the cutting edge. Before that you had the phone phreakers and even before that you had people who were seriously into radios. I think its already happening with the current crop of LLMs, generative AI, and just all the various ML models that have been developed that and another generation has already started doing the same. Right now they are attempting to keep that locked behind corporate doors but we already have Llama locally thanks to a leak. Thats to say nothing of the budding AR that is also coming. The idea of putting goggles on my head with a computer that makes up the story, graphics and projects them onto the real world would have sounded crazy to me when I was knocking people out of AOL chat rooms with a concon.

colesantiago 2y ago

Is there any reason why there are comments are in there, it would be nice if the functions were self documenting. Other than the comments being distracting making the code hard to read, this is a great deep dive blog post which is very technically impressive.

selectodude 2y ago

This is going to come off as overly cynical - it's a very cool project. But are you really pushing the original Xbox to the limit when you replace and overclock the CPU, increase RAM, add solid state storage, and overclock the GPU? It's not really an Xbox at that point.

settsu 2y ago
Whether it's an Xbox is arguable, but for the purposes of the topic and the post, you're mostly arguing semantics. If one were to "push a Honda Civic to the limits" with an array of engine and suspension modifications, for purposes of discussion you're going to sound like you're just splitting hairs by asking "Is it really still a Civic, tho??", even if you could be technically correct. The author has the right to title their content as they desire and you can just rewrite it as "Modding the OG Xbox to within an inch of its life" in your head...
- Sardtok 2y ago
  If the only original parts of the car, are the chassis, I would say it's not really a Honda Civic anymore.
  - MadnessASAP 2y ago
    I'm going to rely on ol' Thseuses ship here and say that as long as you started with a Honda Civic, you get to call it a Honda Civic.
Ericson2314 2y ago
I think using the same motherboard counts for something
Aurornis 2y ago
> But are you really pushing the original Xbox to the limit This is in the context of XBox modding, where “original Xbox” should be interpreted to mean “not an XBox 360”. Halo 2 can run at higher resolutions on a 360, so clarifying that this was a modding project on the original Xbox is helpful. You have to read it in context. It’s not literally about an unmodded Xbox, it’s a modding project and the target for the mods was an original Xbox.

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orliesaurus 2y ago

that's a lot of work... wow - interesting that your friend "doom" didnt want to reveal themselves

echelon_musk 2y ago
It's almost certainly grimdoomer.
- dako2117 2y ago
  yes https://x.com/grimdoomer/status/1780260482718573055?s=61&t=0T8ysTPQFP96cc79SwUY4Q https://x.com/grimdoomer/status/1780260482718573055?s=61&t=0...
- amatecha 2y ago
  grimdoomer is the person who wrote the article
- landr0id 2y ago
  Grimdoomer wrote the article but doom is a different person -- and he's not exactly anonymous. I'm not sure what the other commentator was implying.
nxobject 2y ago
Not that it's our place to take speculation seriously, or speculate at all – but I _plausibly_ imagine working in an industry where I'd think twice before connecting my real-world identity to XBox reverse-engineering, just to be on the safe side.
867-5309 2y ago
Doom9 sprung to mind
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bearjaws 2y ago

1. Resolders RAM to upgrade from 64mb to 128mb of vram 2. Solders new CPU onto console only to discover its gpu bottle necked 3. Enables OCing the GPU on the original Xbox, only to run into memory bandwidth limits 4. Reverse engineers Halo 2 source code to set scaling to 720p or 1080p (output is interlaced to 1080i) 5. Speeds up the hard drive to faster load in textures My god this man is more dedicated to Halo 2 than Bungie is to any of their IP today.

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strictnein 2y ago
> My god this man is more dedicated to Halo 2 than Bungie is to any of their IP today Bungie isn't involved with Halo at all any more. Microsoft owns the IP and it's developed by 343 Industries. Bungie has Destiny/Destiny 2 now and the upcoming Marathon extraction shooter.
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  Most D2 players flat out don't trust Bungie anymore. Not only have they been mailing in their seasonal content for years now, but their last campaign was abysmal. Taking an extra 6 months on development won't change things. I've got a group of 12 friends who all have been playing since alpha. One has purchased the next expansion, and nobody else is even considering it. I'm relieved to finally be done with it, personally.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    As someone who watched their friend play through Destiny 1 for hundreds of hours, I don't know what anyone was expecting? That game clearly did not respect it's players and their time or money, yet still made insanely good profits, so why would they do anything different? Remember how much they paid Peter Dinklage for his voice acting, and his character sounded absolutely phoned in, and lazy, to the point that they eventually had to replace it with much better voice acting by someone else who was cheaper

alex3305 2y ago

[flagged]

aprilnya 2y ago
also don’t love the sidebar taking up like 1/4 of the screen on mobile lol
jccalhoun 2y ago
The site was terrible. Reader view didn't work for me it just turned it into a blank page. I had to open up inspector and change the css rules to read it.
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seanf 2y ago

Link to the video from the bottom of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_nk21389u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_nk21389u8 The video includes side-by-side comparison between the original upscaled 480p and 720p. Around 7:00 you hear about what it takes to get 720p and maintain around 30fps gameplay. Not only a great article, but also a great video to summarize the changes needed get the higher resolution.

Lammy 2y ago

> I often get comments saying “[720x480]’s not not a 16:9 resolution” or “that’s not real 480p”, but “480p” encapsulates a range of resolutions and aspect ratios and 720×480 is the resolution the Xbox considers to be 480p (so take it up with Microsoft, not me…). Take it up with some ITU dudes in the 1970s actually: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf “The February 1980 note further suggested that the number of samples per active line period should be greater than 715.5 to accommodate all of the European standards active line periods. While the number of pixels per active line equal to 720 samples per line was not suggested until the next note, (720 is the number found in Rec. 601 and SMPTE 125), 720 is the first value that “works”. 716 is the first number greater than 715.5 that is divisible by 4 (716 = 4 x 179), but does not lend itself to standards conversion between 525-line component and composite colour systems or provide sufficiently small pixel groupings to facilitate special effects. Arguments in support of 720 were provided in additional notes prior to IBC in September 1980. […] As noted above, Rec. 601 provided 720 samples per active line for the luminance channel and 360 samples for each of the colour-difference signals. When the ITU defined HDTV, they stipulated: ‘the horizontal resolution for HDTV as being twice that of conventional television systems’ described in Rec. 601 and a picture aspect ratio of 16:9. A 16:9 picture ratio requires one-third more pixels than a 4:3 picture ratio. Starting with 720, doubling the resolution to 1440 and adjusting the count for a 16:9 aspect ratio leads to the 1920 sample per active line defined as the basis for HDTV [9]. Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1920 x (9/16) = 1080. Progressive scan systems at 1280 pixels per line and 720 lines per frame are also a member of the ‘720-pixel’ family. 720 pixels x 4/3 (resolution improvement) x 4/3 (16:9 aspect ratio adjustment) = 1280. Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1280 x (9/16) = 720. Therefore, most digital television systems, including digital video tape systems and DVD recordings are derived from the 4:2:2 basic standard format. The 720 pixel-per-active-line structure became the basis of a family of structures (the 720-pixel family) that was adopted for MPEG-based systems including both conventional television and HDTV systems.”

bestham 2y ago
I thought DVD only supported 4:3 anamorphic video with non square pixels for the correct playback aspect ratio.

Agingcoder 2y ago

That’s pretty sophisticated - kudos to the author. I love this.

rationalfaith 2y ago

[dead]

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

Other than "hacker spirit" (which is completely legitimate), is there a reason you'd want to play Halo 2 this way—going through the effort of modding your console to add memory and overclock the gpu—instead of playing the PC version?

jimmywetnips 2y ago
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say no
qwerty456127 2y ago
Whenever an old device is supposed to be unsuitable for doing something it usually feels great to use it for just that, proving it's well capable or even better. This probably is a psychological disorder (usually mild and fun to have though) - an opposite counterpart of obsession with being among the first to buy the newest model of the most popular gadget. Both give a sense of superiority :-)
- Narishma 2y ago
  It's not really the old device anymore when you have to upgrade memory, CPU and GPU.
  - qwerty456127 2y ago
    This is subjective. I personally always loved upgrading the hell out of old PC (install the maximum possible memory and CPU after patching the BIOS and soldering the socket, add a SATA card to a computer which only had IDE etc).
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      I feel like there's something different between doing this to a PC, which is in some sense designed to be upgraded, and doing this to a game console.
      - 2y ago

randomopining 2y ago

Why would you waste your time doing this?

Arrath 2y ago

FTA: "The tag data system is designed to be as flexible and performant as possible, and, in my opinion the inner workings are really a feat of engineering. I could write an entire blog post about the inner workings of the tag data system and why I think it makes the Blam engine one of the most flexible engines ever made, but that isn’t relevant to this post." I would love to read this article if it ever gets written.

tehsauce 2y ago
If you have written something like this somewhere, or know someone that has, please share!
tiptup300 2y ago
me too I was into halo 2 modding when I was young and knew very little programming at all. the concepts there blew my mind, almost, I was too green to follow how it worked even to start. it was so dynamic I fundamentally didn't understand how something could be like that. how could a player position be within the same context as a weapon that had configurations and then effects themselves were in that same list. a lot of the stuff I'm interested in very much circles around these same concepts.