[HN Gopher] Halo 2 in HD: Pushing the Original Xbox to the Limit
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Halo 2 in HD: Pushing the Original Xbox to the Limit
Author : campuscodi
Score : 308 points
Date : 2024-04-18 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (icode4.coffee)
(TXT) w3m dump (icode4.coffee)
| iBotPeaches wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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?
| Chabsff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bordercases wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They did. For the next generation. They updated their model
| of "child safe".
| robin_reala wrote:
| Hot Coffee was in GTA: San Andreas, a game that a "Mature"
| rating in the US i.e. only for people of ages 17+. They cut
| Hot Coffee to get to Mature from Adults Only (18+). Kids
| shouldn't have been anywhere near these games if parents
| cared about what they were looking at.
| Chabsff wrote:
| At the risk of repeating myself. The issue with Hot Coffee
| was that it cast a huge shadow on the ESRB system _itself_.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Getting GTA San Andreas from the pawn shop was the happiest
| moment in my pre-pubescent life, and it had nothing to do
| with the mature aspects of it.
| RGamma wrote:
| German GTA: SA (and VC) was even more cut. No
| dismemberment, no blood, no money from corpses.
|
| Austria imports...
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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#Devel
| opmen...
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Wasn't H1Z1 a knockoff of DayZ first, which then pivoted
| to the Battle Royale format after the success of PUBG?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > was on consoles
|
| > genre defining
|
| you walked right past it
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Wouldn't that innovation belong to the original Halo
| then? Halo 2 was mostly iterative improvements.
| talldayo wrote:
| I'm a hardcore Quake/Unreal apologist, but you gotta hand
| _something_ to Halo and Halo 2. Gorgeous shader-based
| graphics for the time, vehicles, absurd arsenals, wide-open
| maps, and 16 player(!!!) LAN play. It 's a game that would
| have sold like gangbusters on PC, and was only _that much
| more_ successful for being well-supported on console too.
|
| One might even argue that the success of Halo is what
| forced arena shooters like Counter Strike and Team Fortress
| to evolve or die. There was more at stake after it
| released, and outside the competitive circles there wasn't
| much demand for the FPS equivalent of Wheaties.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I have had tons of fun with Halo, but I am fixated on
| this "innovative" classification. It feels more like
| right place right time. Had Golden Eye been LAN play,
| would it have been termed as most innovative?
|
| Edit: I should also give a shout out to Tribes for
| hitting a lot of those same notes
| coldpie wrote:
| Halo 2's online multiplayer introduced (or popularized?)
| party-based matchmaking. So instead of having to
| coordinate all your buddies joining the same pre-existing
| server, you'd join up as a party and then drop into a
| matchmaking queue, which would set up a game against
| opponents, optionally taking a skill-based ranking into
| account. They even did a bunch of marketing around this,
| since it was a new concept at the time:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGSuPZVgxLg
| kipchak wrote:
| Halo 2 was basically synonymous with Xbox Live and
| everything that came with it when it launched (for better
| or worse). For example popularizing voice chat (including
| proximity!), rapid matchmaking, persistent parties
| between matches and gamemodes and player ranks and
| levels. They talk it about it a bit in the second half of
| this video.
|
| https://youtu.be/YGSuPZVgxLg?si=cQZRaXJGaGFaKuL-&t=172
| kh_hk wrote:
| Battlefield 1942 comes to mind as some predecessor close
| to what you describe
| talldayo wrote:
| Hell, even Perfect Dark before _that_. I 'm not one to
| defend Halo as the most-innovative, especially with the
| disproportionate amount of funding and manpower that went
| into it.
|
| That being said, I think Halo deserves commendation for
| bringing a lot to the mainstream without compromise. The
| same people that casually enjoyed Halo were probably not
| also playing Goldeneye or Arma in their free time. And
| marketing be damned, Halo is _fun_ even today. Hopping in
| a match of CE makes me lament how little team-based
| shooters have progressed in the past 20 years.
| kh_hk wrote:
| To me it's crazy to think how far ahead of its time in
| terms of emergent behavior was Battlefield compared to
| other games, besides battle arenas. Probably it wasn't
| the first one either, but it's the one that comes to
| mind.
|
| Picking up a tank or a jeep is one thing, but going for
| controlling an aircraft carrier or a submarine? Even if
| the controls were really primitive, it felt amazing!
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| halo 2 came out with xbox live and defined the experience.
| social lobbies, matchmaking, etc
| CYR1X wrote:
| Clans, ranked based play, integrated voice chat.
|
| That last one was in other xbox live games before it, but
| Halo 2's Xbox Live brought online gaming to everyone's
| television room whereas before it was only on the
| computer.
| fwip wrote:
| The online multiplayer (party-based matchmaking, including
| ranked mode) was huge.
| Andrex wrote:
| I'd probably give the crown to EverQuest (1.0) myself.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's
| jaw dropping what they're doing out there.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Yeah, I've heard of that decompilation, and have been more
| closely following the complete decompilation and PC port of
| Perfect Dark, which is pretty amazing.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I agree with you in general, but I think it has to be said
| that we also live in the era of things like the source for
| Unreal Engine 5 being completely and wholly available, along
| with a zillion tutorials and extremely well documented
| source. This is unlike anything we had, and better in
| basically every single way imaginable. In the hardware world
| there's Pi's, dirt cheap PCBs that you can have delivered in
| < 24 hours, and so on endlessly. It's like instead of
| breaking into a trailer, we've all been granted carte blanche
| access to a mansion.
|
| But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and
| esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of
| that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work,
| largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody
| wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and
| common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless
| you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I
| was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was
| enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's
| something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much
| longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by
| naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon
| enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > But maybe there was something about how counter-culture
| and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because
| of that.
|
| There's definitely that element, but I also think something
| missed by compartmentalizing hardware "tinkering" to
| devices designed specifically for the task. Nothing about a
| Raspberry Pi, for instance, is mysterious. If a person is
| going to buy one, they already have a significant level of
| interest and base knowledge. A kid's not gonna have one
| lying around and get curious about it unless their parent
| is a geek who owns those things, and even then said kid may
| have no good reason to even bother with one. Practically
| nobody today is opening up their laptop or their phone to
| mod it or even just see what's inside. I'm not saying the
| modern situation is bad, but a significant amount of it is
| artificial in a way that wasn't when the devices one would
| play with were the devices actually being used, and it's
| not clear to me whether what we have now is actually better
| in regard to inspiring future generations. Engaging with
| one's everyday hardware is an exercise in the power process
| that fewer and fewer generations are experiencing.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The big difference is that people used to mod existing
| games. That allowed modders to leverage the game's engine,
| gameplay design, art, and even its existing playerbase.
|
| Having a full-featured open-source game engine is great,
| but starting with that means starting at square one.
|
| By obsessively enforcing copyright and "anti-cheat", we
| effectively bury the game-making process 6 feet
| underground. Every game is declared dead at the very moment
| of its release. Every decision its creators made up to then
| is set in stone. The game studio itself must exist in
| isolation, ignorant of the very world it is creating its
| games for.
|
| It's no wonder that AAA studios are so out of touch with
| the people who play their games. Gamers are explicitly
| excluded from the creative process.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| One consideration is maybe stuff that's "hackable", i.e.
| immediately accessible, can be incrementally and reversibly
| modified, is more accessible to "play" while stuff that's
| extremely capable but has a high activation cost (setting
| up the environment, learning all the stuff to make
| something basic etc.) is more accessible only to "focused /
| goal oriented study" and this has all kinds of implications
| on who does it, who succeeds, under which circumstances
| etc.
|
| e.g. my friend tells me you can open game.exe in notepad +
| change this value to walk on lava, then I fiddle with it
| and tl;dr make a map of my school, then get frustrated with
| limitations and start learning a game engine _with some
| practical background on what these concepts are_ etc.
|
| vs. I decide want to make a game because that's cool, I buy
| a book on game programming, it depends on these libraries,
| I install them, I install a compiler, the libraries don't
| work with the compiler/each other, ......... and give up
| because the grit in my life is reserved for stuff other
| than video games.
|
| ... like really, what is the overlap of people that are
| really mind blowingly creative as artists, and the people
| that are super type A driven to go through all this
| frustration up front? less friction, more better art
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I started coding with an Action Replay cartridge. Press a
| button and you get dumped into a new context where can fully
| inspect the machine and running program, and can modify any
| of it.
|
| That's easier it was later on Windows (which for 15 years was
| how 99% of people used computers) and anything after.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| CheatEngine exists on modern systems and can still do a lot
| of this, though modern game engines are less friendly to
| the simple "scan for the health variable and set it to
| 1000" workflow of yesteryear. However, newer versions of
| cheat engine include C#/monogame decompilers that let you
| screw around with some unity games
| bee_rider wrote:
| They've got, with wildly varying levels of skill and
| investment: unity, unreal, godot, or Roblox.
|
| Not quite as fun as modding though.
| anonymousab wrote:
| I think adding your own touch to something you're more
| intimately familiar with helps ease people into it.
| Touching an asset file to modify a texture and instantly
| see the results in your favorite game is a lot more
| approachable (and appreciate-able) for someone starting
| out, I think.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 100% agree
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I agree and have the same feeling we've lost something as so
| much computer-centric tech has become relatively inaccessible
| in the name of 'security' (although much seems like efforts
| 'secure' business models or IP). As you observed, the tech
| has also evolved in ways which make it relatively
| undiscoverable through casual tinkering. Although perhaps we
| suffer from a generational perspective bias, I think there
| really was a 'golden era' of computer tech hobbyist
| accessibility and discoverability.
|
| When Did the 'Golden Era' Begin?
|
| I'd peg it as starting around the late Usenet era.
| Interestingly, there was definitely a time period in consumer
| computer tech when it was too early. I know because I started
| "too early" and missed being a teenager in the golden era
| because I got my first computer as a teenager in 1981. It was
| a Radio Shack Color Computer with 4K of memory, a 0.9 Mhz
| 8-bit 6809 processor and storage via an external cassette
| tape player. Fortunately, the ROM BASIC on that model was
| perhaps the most evolved 8-bit ROM BASIC Microsoft ever made
| (vs the early Commodore & Atari flavors) and Radio Shack did
| a fantastic job on the large, well-illustrated color manuals.
|
| Unfortunately, 1981 was too early because no one in my
| family's extended social network had ever touched a computer.
| So, beyond the BASIC manual in the box, I was on my own with
| my new computer. While there were a few big magazines like
| BYTE on news stands, very little in them applied to my
| computer. I eventually discovered a couple of zine-style
| publications at a distant big news stand. Although they were
| essentially overgrown stapled newsletters printed in B&W,
| they became my lifeline because they had articles written by
| hobbyists more advanced than I, as well as mail-order ads for
| cassette tape-based software. This was the key that unlocked
| the mysterious realm of assembly language for me when I
| ordered a $12 homebrew monitor program written by some random
| guy who took out a classified ad. The local library didn't
| have any books relevant to my new microcomputer, local
| colleges only offered computer courses under the math dept
| and those were focused on mainframes and COBOL (I think back
| then 'real' CompSci was limited to Ivy League and top tier
| tech unis). Even large bookstores had nothing useful to me I
| could order other than Osborne's 6809 CPU book which was
| really an architecture and instruction set reference manual
| mostly incomprehensible to an isolated teenage hobbyist
| starting out.
|
| A few years later 300 baud modems became cheap enough for
| hobbyists to acquire but it took another year or so for BBSes
| to emerge which were targeted at my computer (most BBSes
| prior to that were run on CP/M hardware and focused on one
| platform (not mine)). So dialing BBSes focused on my platform
| involved long-distance charges which meant short calls.
| Another year later FidoNet connected larger BBSes and
| national-level info began to circulate and my local hobby
| scene stayed pretty much like this for a few years. New info
| centered around zines, local computer club meetings, mailed
| tapes & diskettes and short BBS calls. Info was available but
| it was scarce and you had to work at getting it.
|
| That's why I think the true golden era truly took off in the
| late Usenet period. That's when anyone could subscribe to a
| ~$10/mo service providing 1200 baud access to Usenet feeds in
| their local area code. Before that, unless you were at a
| university studying CompSci or worked at a uni or large tech
| company, Usenet was a magical land you only heard about on
| BBSes or at user group meetings. When random home hobbyists
| got direct access to the firehose of high-quality, global
| Nerdverse content that was the Usenet CompSci feeds it felt
| like the Enlightenment dawning. From there the transition to
| the early web was pretty natural since a lot of early tech-
| centric websites were much like a BBS ring. We didn't need
| search because they mostly linked to each other and people
| were running them as a hobby so few had ads other than maybe
| a sponsorship from an ISP or modem company (usually just paid
| in free service or hardware). Fortunately, the tech hobbyist
| web wasn't impacted much by the 2001 dot com crash since it
| was never about revenue. Up until the slow decline gradually
| started in the mid-2000s, it was pretty great - flashing
| BLINK tags and all. Honestly, we didn't even realize how good
| we had it, or imagine that it might someday end.
|
| When Did the 'Golden Era' End?
|
| Having lived through the pre-Golden Era, the early days and
| through the end, I think the seeds of the Golden Era's slow
| decline were planted when the modern web business began to
| emerge from the ashes of the dot com crash. Although things
| were still pretty hobbyist-discoverable in desktop OSes and
| the web through 2010-ish, troubling signs were on the
| horizon. For those paying attention, the rapid dominance of
| iOS in the late 2000s was ominous. Apple's business model
| required a walled garden app store and their concept of users
| was not as active explorers but as purely passive eyeballs
| for media and app-snacking. Even though a few app developers
| did well in the early app store, the fundamental model
| relegated them to the role of sharecroppers working Apple's
| farm with Apple's tools and selling only to Apple's store
| (with no access to their app's end-users).
|
| In all, entry-level, home-based tech hobbyists got almost 20
| really amazing years in the 'Golden Era' from roughly the
| late 80s to the late 2000s. It would be wonderful if in the
| distant future that period is known as "The First Golden Era"
| but right now it's hard to be optimistic. While there is
| still an enormous amount of hobbyist info available online
| and more emerging, it's in a context of equally increasing
| locked down areas and ever decreasing discoverability (though
| open source and Github-like sites are notable exceptions).
|
| Maybe this is why retro computing and retro gaming are
| booming now with new people who never experienced it the
| first time. It's a place where that unique Golden Era ethos,
| vibe and community still exists. Last year I went to a local
| user group meeting for Amiga computers, which is what I had
| mid-80s to early 90s. I met a bunch of enthusiastic Amiga
| users who hadn't been born when I bought my first Amiga. It
| was strange to feel both "old" and "OG Cool" at the same
| moment but also heartening to feel that same open community
| vibe still beating. :-)
| CYR1X wrote:
| To be fair you have to realize how much more dependent the
| global economy is on software nowadays. Halo was a Bungie
| product, and when Bungie left as Microsoft took it over yeah,
| the product had loftier business goals that needed to be
| protected. Smaller devs can't really reach critical market
| saturation anymore like they used to.
|
| You can criticize where things has gone with MTX but I don't
| think that was a choice by the game developers. I also think
| it's a generational thing as you and I are now too old to
| spend all day fucking around with some game we played a ton.
| I'm sure the kids of today are tinkering with
| minecraft/fortnite/whatever replaced those games.
|
| Also to me it's a bit of wanting to try and put the tooth
| paste back in the tube. When we were teenagers modding Halo
| we maybe didn't fully understand the impacts it had on the
| game's community and the overall experience. As an adult I
| just see how games like Call of Duty appear to be constantly
| losing the fight against hackers, and using over engineered
| matchmaking algos with SSBM to try and maximize the typical
| user's gameplay experience. But I can't regain my naivety and
| be one of the many younger adults who probably don't even
| really notice these issues, the way I didn't when I played
| Halo 3 on Xbox Live which had boosting, standby, and stealth
| servers.
| dtech wrote:
| I think you're making the classic mistake of thinking that
| because your on-ramp isn't available anymore there are no on-
| ramps anymore.
|
| I read an extremely similar comment two decades or so ago
| about a dev saying that no-one would learn computers anymore
| because everyone now used GUIs instead of CLIs...
|
| Yes modding might be harder nowadays, but you have things
| like Scratch and Hedy, or the freely available Unreal/Unity
| dev tools with asset stores.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Modding it's pretty alive on PC.
| huntedsnark wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| panopticon wrote:
| Oh wow, I had totally forgotten about server hunting.
|
| I kept a list of "good" servers (based on ping, map
| rotation, who played there, mods, etc), but when they
| were empty finding somewhere else was a complete pain.
|
| I miss the camaraderie on some of those dedicated
| servers, but I know I wouldn't be able to get into
| something like that these days.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think a lot of that camaraderie and sense of community
| has moved to places like Discord and Reddit.
|
| I have a group that regularly plays Overwatch together
| every Friday. Whenever more than 5 people show up, we
| play custom games. The workshop is surprisingly powerful,
| so it even gives us some of the experience we used to get
| with mods for games like Quake and Unreal.
|
| When we have 5 or fewer people though, we really
| appreciate the game's matchmaking, even though it is far
| from perfect. It is a lot better at creating balanced
| matches than any server auto-balance feature ever was,
| while always keeping us on the same team.
| amatecha wrote:
| Don't forget the post-game carnage report, which, while
| first present in Marathon, was refined and provided the
| best post-multiplayer-game stats of any game I've seen,
| even years later.
| CYR1X wrote:
| The telemetry bungie used to popular stats on their
| website is better than pretty much any modern game today
| outside of like CS2. I will caveat that by saying modern
| practices require you put things behind an api with a
| paywall of some sort, but they had freaking action
| heatmaps in 2004.
| bombcar wrote:
| It was not only interesting and fun to look at but also
| informative- you could learn things about them maps from
| them, in an era before YouTube.
| huntedsnark wrote:
| I had interpreted the parent comment to be about gameplay,
| but those are all fantastic points about matchmaking and
| the related QoL improvements. It absolutely is taken for
| granted because I forgot Halo 2 was the first to do _all_
| of that well, and in one complete package.
| DonnieBurger wrote:
| 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/
| AgentME wrote:
| It's also still officially supported and popular through the
| Halo Master Chief Collection which is available on Steam.
| MarkyC4 wrote:
| (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)
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If the only original parts of the car, are the chassis, I
| would say it's not really a Honda Civic anymore.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think using the same motherboard counts for something
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| landr0id wrote:
| >Halo 2 can run at higher resolutions on a 360, so clarifying
| that this was a modding project on the original Xbox is
| helpful.
|
| This isn't true. It renders exactly the same as it does on
| the Xbox 360 but the scaler chip handles the higher
| resolutions.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Getting the most out of existing hardware is a pursuit in
| itself. See the retro computer scene. Car "nodding" is similar
| to that. Some want a factory perfect Corvette. Some want a
| model A with a engine 50 years newer. Taking something known
| and familiar and twisting it to your will is awesome.
| xyst wrote:
| Ship of Theseus problem, lol
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah, that was my thought as well. They aren't "pushing the
| original Xbox to the limit", they are pushing custom hardware
| to the limit. The title is super misleading.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Even worse, it's a commodity desktop CPU! They aren't running
| "Halo 2" on an "Xbox" in HD, they are running a heavily
| modified build of Halo 2 on a somewhat custom PC.
|
| We had that already, it's called "Halo 2 for Windows Vista!",
| and now we have MCC.
|
| Granted, Halo 2 on Vista had way higher hardware requirements
| to run at 30fps in 720p I think, though most of that was just
| Vista overhead.
|
| Actually it's worse again, they modified the Xbox kernel too!
|
| This is really impressive work but it's also way more niche
| than the title wants you to believe.
| shocks wrote:
| As per the article, the modded CPU isn't required.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Err what? The original CPU is a commodity desktop one as
| well, I don't see how the CPU swap makes this more of a PC.
| landr0id wrote:
| You may have missed this (from the GitHub repo):
|
| >You do not need a CPU upgraded console to use this patch and
| having one does not provide any additional performance gains
| that I've been able to measure during testing.
|
| And this:
|
| >This provided a 10% increase in transfer speeds for consoles
| running the stock IDE cable and up to a 300% increase
| (theoretically, the actual transfer speeds depend greatly on
| the size of data being transferred) for consoles with an
| upgraded IDE cable.
|
| And this (again from the GitHub repo):
|
| >If your console has 128MB of RAM this patch will utilize the
| extra RAM available which will enable use of 720p and 1080i
| video modes as well as increase the size of in-memory caches
| for textures and geometry. The size increase for the texture
| and geometry caches will significantly reduce pop-in issues to
| the point of being almost non-existent.
|
| For just 480p you can overclock the GPU on a stock console and
| use a different IDE cable. I think the remark about the SSD was
| unintentionally misleading -- perhaps he did mean the combo of
| 80pin + SSD though.
|
| It does not require an overclocked CPU (he states that the CPU
| was not the bottleneck), and the increased RAM is only required
| if you want resolutions of 720p or higher.
|
| I relayed the feedback though, he might update the blog post to
| make these points more explicit.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| that's a lot of work... wow - interesting that your friend "doom"
| didnt want to reveal themselves
| echelon_musk wrote:
| It's almost certainly grimdoomer.
| dako2117 wrote:
| yes https://x.com/grimdoomer/status/1780260482718573055?s=61&
| t=0...
| amatecha wrote:
| grimdoomer is the person who wrote the article
| landr0id wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Doom9 sprung to mind
| bearjaws wrote:
| 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.
| strictnein wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_
| Uvix wrote:
| It was about availability for future recordings, not
| price. If cost was a concern they wouldn't have had Nolan
| North rerecord all of Dinklage's existing dialogue, just
| replace him going forward.
| bearjaws wrote:
| As a Destiny player I am more than aware they don't own Halo.
|
| They are also not passionate about Destiny 2 and it shows.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| Nostalgia runs hard! So many hours spent in that game. I'm
| happy someone is also as in enamored with the magic as I am!
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| Yeah this is an incredible engineering feat, but I don't think
| I could do it knowing I could just go out and spend $500 on an
| xbox series X to play the remastered version in 120fps at 4k
| instead. I admire this level of dedication.
| seanf wrote:
| Link to the video from the bottom of the article:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 720x480 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
|
| "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."
| Agingcoder wrote:
| That's pretty sophisticated - kudos to the author. I love this.
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