Hello all, I have been following the recent xbox development here and in other places the last month or so. It's been pretty cool to see the hardware upgrades, kernel development, emulation progress, and HD xbe patches. While I've been taking a stab at a few of these things myself, I simply don't have the time or knowledge to accomplish a few things I would love to have. The first one would be to get Halo 1 to play in 720p. People have been patching XBE's to forcible output games into 720p that weren't originally designed to handle it and the results early on are promising. Here are the relevant threads I have come across on this board and others: http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/zaykho-720p-1080i-hex-edit-master-thread.57847/ http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/possible-to-force-720p-in-games.61476/ http://www.theisozone.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=57375 http://www.emuxtras.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=187&t=3724&sid=412279442dd3456527f559bcc8d4f3e9 http://www.theisozone.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=52306 At this point, I have only gotten so far to have Halo 1 output into 720p, but with the internal resolution still at 480p and doubled with some noise on the bottom. Here is a picture: I am offering $100 in paypal in someone can patch the original US Halo 1 xbe to output 720p flawlessly. If I can play it on a standard box without any decrease in performance, the $100 is yours. If it outputs correctly, but performance degrades and an increase in ram or cpu is needed, I will still give you $75. Once I can run through the game on box and confirm it works, I will immediately send the paypal. If, for some reason you are skeptical I will not pay, I don't mind dropping $10-$20 first if you show video proof it works on your console first before sending me the patched xbe.
$150 if you can make it work on the Atari 2600 in 1080p without decrease in performance. If,for some reason you are skeptical I will not pay, I pinky swear I will E-gold you the money.
People have already gotten the following games to work in 720p: I-Ninja Lamborghini Otogi PGR1 PGR2 JSRF House of Dead III Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller Gun Valkyrie Nightcaster Munch's Odyssey Kameo GTA III Voodoo Vince Futurama Metal Arms Future Tactics: The Uprising But whatever, keep talking shit.
Yes, we realize resolution hacks are a thing, but not without "any decrease in performance", however slight it may be (maybe save for a few cases where the console was just idling most of the time (also known as "ugly games with no AI to speak of)). And the way you worded your payment offer made you sound just a bit shady...
Fair enough. I am open to changing the terms some. How about "playable" on a standard xbox for $100 and anything less somewhere in the range of $75-$100 (which can be negotiated)? Playable defined as in a multiplayer game with just 2 people (splitscreen or system link), the framerate does not drop often (not much more often than it already does in some situations). Would it be more reasonable to pay first, assuming the person at least shows some sort of video demonstration as proof?
There is no way we can increase performance when increasing the resolution, most games that run at 720p (there are a few) have performance issues. The Xbox just isn't powerful enough to play them. (The games you listed will have performance issues, so I wouldn't get your hopes up)
There are 1ghz/128mb and 1.4ghz/128mb xboxes out there. My best guess is that the additional resolution will require a larger frame buffer which requires the extra RAM, I'd also wager that they weren't leaving any unused RAM available if they could get away with it but that's pure speculation. I have two 1ghz boxes and Halo 2 does have a rendering performance boost when it comes to overlaying textures on models. A stock XBox clearly shows an untextured model that loads textures over it, with a 1ghz CPU they both load more or less at the same time. Whether or not it's easy or even feasible to get this all working is another question entirely.
I feel like launch games are the most likely to not use all available ram, so there's that. I'm also fairly confident some one will be able to get it to work. I have already accomplished changing the output window to 720p, and it doesn't impact performance at all (it shouldn't, but there's always the chance it could). Someone just needs to find the right patch to have the internal resolution also be 720p.
I thought lets jump in the forums again after a while (to busy with work). Something different but maybe still usefull for some peoples who want to play Halo Combat Evolved PAL in widescreen. I remember i made a widescreen fix for the PAL version of Halo Combat Evolved a year ago since i only saw there was a NTSC hack (Still had the edits somewhere to lazy to drop it in a forum i gest) For the -PAL- version of Halo Combat Evolved to be played in widescreen patch the following default.xbe Halo Combat Evolved -PAL- (Multi language) Game ID: 4d530004 ---------------------------------------------------- Offset: 4CDEF D80DC02B1F00 Change to D80D20081F00 Offset: 1EA0E0 0000003F80221100E0221100A00A1100 Change to AAAA2A3F80221100E0221100A00A1100 Offset: 100119 D82520081F00D9051C081F00D8252008 Change to D825A0A01F00D9051C081F00D825A0A0 ------------- Black border's fix FMV's Offset: 10C250 00D80D402D1F000FBF05A0922F000FBF Change to 00D80D540D1F000FBF05A0922F000FBF Enjoy!
Yeah widescreen has been "accomplished" but it stretches the HUD so to me I can't really tell if they work. Just curious, can anyone point out to me a way to confirm it does do anamorphic widescreen? I think the HUD can be fixed by changing the map files.
