Original Xbawks

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

https://hagensalley.wordpress.com/2...inal-xbox-and-how-it-is-the-best-home-arcade/

Hacking the Original Xbox and how it is the Best Home Arcade
Posted on February 5, 2015 by thesubcon3
Those of you who have followed me since the vgmastersclub.com days may remember that I had a custom MAME full sized arcade with a computer in it. The system ran pretty much anything I could throw at it, however over the years it ran into the issue that all computers do; updates bogging it down to a snails pace combined with incompatibility problems. That led me to using it less and less over the years. I even broke down the arcade into a sit down to make it more accessible, which still didn’t result in any extra play time. I’d say my last time playing it was around when I published my X68000 article, but that was short lived as well. It was a sad time.

During the winter/spring of 2014, a buddy of mine provided me with a hacked original xbox. It played NES perfectly on a CRT and could rip original xbox games to the small stock hard drive for quicker access and loading. As much as I enjoyed it, I have any NES game I could want to play on real cartridge and the original xbox was pretty far back on the list in my backlog as a console, so it was only marginally cool to me. Because of that, the xbox sat in a tote unused for months; that was until I read an article online about this crazy emulator for a hacked xbox that could emulate arcade games pretty much perfectly. Knowing that the xbox was a more powerful system then my old Windows machine the I used to have in my arcade, I had my hopes up. However I had no idea what was in store for me!

The program that I read about was called xbmc and was an all encompassing media center for the xbox that could play movies and play a handful of systems, including the arcade. The thing is that I was pretty much only interested in was the arcade and it apparently wasn’t as good as the article said. Upon researching xbox arcade emulation further I found a forum dedicated to two projects called Coinops and Vision.

Coinops is a huge database that can display and play a variety of systems all with video previews and marquees. Vision is more flashy and has tons of graphics popping up all over, with videos, but is limited on how many games are in it. Because I would rather have more games, I chose to install Coinops. I also researched how to upgrade the hard drive and it was pretty easy so I threw in a 250GB in it.

Coinops is a beast! Not only does it have every arcade game, but I was able to put in every NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PS1, SMS, TG16 and even obscure consoles, handhelds and computers. After going through and deleting games that I’d never play, I’m at about 5000 games!

The best part of this project is that all of the games and emulators within Coinops are optimized to run perfectly on the Xbox. That is a huge upgrade from my MAME arcade with Windows XP.

I normally play this on a CRT in my gaming room, but I am meaning to try this out on my 4K UHD TV since it has a game mode. My test is using Super Mario Bros and seeing if there is any control lag at all. If not, then it will be golden!

Never before have I had such an all encompassing machine to play games on. It is so close to the actual consoles that I am very tempted to make this my method of play when I have to move next. Only time will tell…..

Retroarch sux on this console but diz gonna be gud, every arcade / old console game optimized to run flawlessly on Xbawks, every game with preview, just put ~100GB via FTP and voila - ultimate arcade cabinet the cheapest way possible. Once I buy larger HDD I'll make it.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

My Xbox S Controller died and I need to replace it - propably gonna try Duke version, is it good / better than S?

 

[Silverfish]

It depends. How large are your hands compared to, for example, Shaquille O'Neal?

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

Its design is based on the old Microsoft "Sidewinder" controllers of yore, with rebranding+modifications (I hesitate to name them "improvements" in any sense of the word...). Those were decent, if cumbersome kit. All of this likely tells you fuckall if you weren't a functional human being in the 90s, I realize.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

How large are your hands compared to, for example, Shaquille O'Neal?

Somewhere between his and the ones of the natural born pianist.

 

[newtmonkey]

I know this is an old thread that has been resurrected, but...

oddech_wymarlych_swiatow

If you haven't played the Otogi games, they are excellent. Another fun exclusive is Crimson Sea, which is sort of like Dynasty Warriors but you fight insect aliens instead of Chinamen. The smaller insects swarm together when they attack and it's like a sea of bugs rushing at you, very cool effect.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

How did they fail to counquer Japan with THAT?

 

[Ash]

Girl on the left is mediocre. Girl on the right is alright. Meh.

Xbox was such a shit sellout's machine. All the PC devs that had attained notable success at the time made intentionally garbage-tier sequels to their first person games on it in a soulless attempt to multiply said success. ALL of them. The only reason Morrowind and Arx Fatalis weren't heavily dumbed down versions was because the developer's standing had not been secured yet like id/valve/whatever had.
Majority of exclusives were shit tier. Any jap making an exclusive for it is a sellout by default for abandoning their nation (unless they had justification) and contributed to the mass decline.

That said, Ninja Gaiden is the absolute shit and still can't properly be played on PC (sigma version is decline), and Call of Cthulhu was pretty cool too though it later got a buggy PC release which patches can fix up.

 

[schru]

Neither Half-Life 2 nor Doom 3 were designed with consoles in mind, if that's what you mean by mentioning Id and Valve. Their Xbox versions were later ports.

 

[Ash]

That's true. it was just a sellout party all around in that decade. But Xbox and Xbox 360 in particular stood out.

 

[Ravielsk]

2) PS2 multiplats - PS2 emulation is still demanding, I don't have a PC powerful enough to reach real hardware quality let alone to surpass it so Xbox gives me cheapest way to play multiplatform games (and many of them have better graphics than PS2 / Dreamcast ports).

No joke, this is the strongest argument for owning an OG Xbox in "current year+7". It lets you experience the 6th gen multiplats in a way they were intended and some can even be enhanced by it. For example Darkwatch natively does not run at 480p but a simple hex edit can fix that along with a widescreen hack for modern displays. The only exception to this being Silent Hill 2 as that game was entirely made for the OG PS2 and is best played that way but anything else is pretty much best experienced on the OG XBOX. Also you can get a pretty cheap(around 20$) hdmi converter for it from aliexpress and connect it to modern TVs without any issues.

Everything else is kinda meh or done better by other platforms but the multiplats are something where it still excels.

 

[Ravielsk]

How did they fail to counquer Japan with THAT?

Spoiler

Because marketing can get you only so far. The OG xbox had literary no games when compared to the PS2 and it did not even have any exclusives that would be interesting for a Japanese audience(Ok, maybe it had like 2-3). Microsofts biggest failure with the whole Xbox brand even to this day remains the lack of their own car park. Outside of Halo no other series is really associated with Xbox as a whole and Halo is effectively irrelevant outside of North America. Hell, half the reason why the Xbox360 was such a success was because Sony fucked up with the PS3. Had Sony been less autistic about the Cell processor the 360 may have been the last xbox.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

No joke, this is the strongest argument for owning an OG Xbox in "current year+7". .

Nowadays I think that homebrew stuff is where Xbox truly shines. Apart from emulation it has so many great ports from PC:

Quake 1/2/3 (heh, Q3A console recognizes Xbox as Pentium 3 PC!)
Doom / Doom 2 / Final Doom
Duke Nukem 3D
Shadow Warrior
Half-Life (2 versions, one for stock 64 MB Ram Xbox and superior one for expanded 128 MB RAM).
Abuse
Wolfenstein 3D
Diablo
Heart of Darkness
Aliens vs Predator 1
Bermuda Syndrome
Heretic
Hexen 1/2
Jazz Jackrabbit

Damn. just port Strife, Redneck Rampage, Last Rites and Blood and Xbox will become fps heaven.

 

[Zlaja]

I used to have an Xbawks back in the day, and one of the more memorable games I played on it back then was Jade Empire. Remember Silk Fox, boyz?

 

[ferratilis]

No one has mentioned the best reason to own an Xbox: Splinter Cell series. Even to this day, it's the best way to experience Splinter Cell games because some of the graphical effects are simply not the same on PC, especially for Pandora Tomorrow, which had amazing lighting that holds up to this day. Due to how weird the shaders were in it, it could never be properly replicated on PC, hence why Ubisoft just pulled it from sale. Modders have done a lot to improve it, but it's still not the same it was on console. I've been playing through the series on Xbox Series S through backwards compatibility and it's been great. Also, Double Agent is only good on the OG Xbox, the 360 version is a different game developed by Ubi Shanghai and it's not even worth playing. You basically get four amazing stealth games on the OG Xbox (after Thief, the best ever made imo), and they hold up incredibly well, whether they're played on the OG Xbox or through back compat on newer consoles.

I started Chaos Theory again last night, forgot how freaky Sam's eyes look.

Spoiler

Some screenshots from Pandora Tomorrow that show the great lighting design:

Spoiler

 

[Owl]

 

[Ash]

Guyz, some of PC games that are better on Xbox, are there any of them? I've heard Jade Empire or DE:IW had terrible PC ports but dunno anything more about it.

Go play Morrowind on Xbawks for redemption.

Now seriously - you got some old news about PC ports. Like - decade old.

Morrowind was indeed a fine port, but not better than the original version and has absolutely zero value to anyone that owns a PC as mods are an absolute must-have. And if you don't own a PC, why? Consoles lost all value over time.

-Barely a scrap of good games made anymore, if it is good it's likely getting a port or is multiplat
-They're not as portable as they used to be. Things are twice the weight a PS1/SNES or whatever was. Less durable too. More prone to defect.
-Couch coop and split screen, I guess there's a few worthwhile from the last 1.6 decades of decline, but the quantity of worthwhile ones has gone down also.
-Emulation has advanced pretty well, no need to almost any older console.
-Indie games typically come to PC first, then if successful maybe get a port to the consoles.
-PCs accept most console controllers, M+K, joystick, any kind of worthwhile input device out of the box.
-Online multiplayer on consoles is now universally subscription-based...you've got to be kidding.
-Mods, of course.
-Then some would argue piracy also but they're horrible people I would never do that of course...I'm joking of course. Yet at the same time not - I would maybe be a pirate if there were any games worth pirating. The good games now are mostly all indies, cheap even on release, and definitely worth supporting to counter all the decline.

What the fuck is the point in consoles? there used to be, back in the day. Not anymore.

I'm pretty sure you do own a PC I just felt like bitching.

I think the best thing about Xbox Morrowind was that, if I recall, it removed the godawful difficulty slider. Pick on game start and you stick with it. the game just begs you to scum the slider to make the shitty combat less shitty and tedious, yet at the same time I love number crunching, using all resources available to me to survive, actual gameplay, so it creates this constant awful nagging temptation to keep going from very hard to hard/normal and back again instead of playing the game properly. Even if it is fucking tedious at times I wanted to play the game as intended, but the game just won't leave you alone with its shitty design screaming at you to make things less tedious and save yourself the headache of 100 misses per hit and staring at those godawful animations. Love the game and hate the sequels, and loved how brutal the RNG combat makes the game, but my god it is flawed. If I were to mod it, I'd keep the RNG inaccuracy, but for sure increase the base hit rate, then improve AI intelligence to compensate and [bunch of other things nobody cares about]. But if I start modding that game I'd still be modding it on my death bed as there is so many flaws and so much potential, never to be realized. Too bad.

 

[Zlaja]

I think the best thing about Xbox Morrowind was that, if I recall, it removed the godawful difficulty slider

I remember owning the Xbox version of the game (with expansions) back in mid 2000's, and there WAS a difficulty slider you could adjust at anytime.

I just felt like bitching

When is that not the case?

 

[Jarpie]

Never forget, or forgive that XBawks was big part of The Great Decline in the early 2000s.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

MVG about porting Quake 1 to Xbox:

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

2022, Xbox still alive and kickin'!

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

I'd be lieing if I said I didn't have a ton of fun playing Halo 1&2 with the bros back in the day. Other than that it was a worthless system. I've never owned an Xbox and I never will. I wouldn't take one if it was free.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

How about running Grim Fandago on Xbox via Damn Small Linux + Wine?