If You Give A Dev A Tricked Out Xbox, They’ll Patch Halo 2
hackaday.com
[Ryan Miceli] had spent a few years poring over and reverse-engineering Halo 2 when a friend asked for a favor. His friend created an improved Xbox with significant overclocks, RAM upgrades, BIOS h…
  • Cadeillac@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    3 months ago

    That’s so wild. No matter how many things I see, I am still surprised at what people are capable of

    • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)@pawb.socialEnglish
      29·
      3 months ago

      I’m wondering how long it is until someone pulls another Kaze and over-optimizes an old console game until it runs in 1080p@60fps on original hardware or something.

      (Kaze Emanuar is a ROM hacker with a deep understanding of Super Mario 64. A couple years ago he released a video showing how he spent a ton of time optimizing the game, resulting in a game that runs on original hardware at 60fps instead of 20fps. Afaik he hasn’t released the vanilla code yet, but I’ve heard he’s used it in some of his other rom hacks and it’s apparently extremely obvious because they run significantly faster than hacks that use the default, unoptimized ROM)

      • Cadeillac@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        3 months ago

        I’ve been playing ROM hacks recently, love their stuff. After seeing Bloodborne at 60fps, as well as Switch 60fps hacks they almost feel like a given at this point. That is by no means meant to diminish them, and I appreciate the hell out of it.

        Pushing technology has always been a big interest of mine. I’ll mod any console that I’m able to. Love watching speed runs and seeing the crazy hacks and things that come out of all the different communities. Still, I keep being amazed

    • BinarySystem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      The left is what the original looks like right as the cutscene switches to that scene. It only looks like that for a fraction of a second and then it renders correctly and looks like the image on the right. In the video, the guy mentions how he added a hard drive overclocking feature to make that pop in not happen or at the very least, significantly reduce it.

      But yeah out of context that thumbnail is confusing.

    • Harvey656@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      The graphics were like that on the left due to the modded xboxes. The, upresing caused the textures to be weird which is why it looked like that. A large portion of the article is about then fixing this issue.

      • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        3 months ago

        Combat Evolved didn’t look that bad either. That just looks like someone on PC put the graphics down as low as possible. Something you can’t even do on Xbox