-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
MVG: Xbox System-Link works across four console generations
- Thread starter supercommodore
- Start date
I obviously know very little about MS's BC process but my understanding is the BC team can get 360 games up and running on current Xbox consoles fairly quickly which isn't necessarily true of original Xbox games so I would guess that's a factor? Also, I think they mostly made the 360 version of Halo 3 available on current Xbox consoles because the MCC was still in rough shape at the time so making 360 Halo 3 available was almost kind of a "make good" situation. By the time they started making original Xbox games available on current Xbox consoles I think plans to meticulously fix the MCC were already underway so they probably figured why bother bringing OG Halo 1&2 to current Xbox? Not defending it but that's my guess.
You can do LAN with MCC, just not across generations. So thats something...
Absolutely, apologies - my post was a bit negative!
You can also play LAN play with Halo 3 with 360s, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
I just miss those old Halo CE/2 LANS and have 2 OG Xboxes, a couple of 360s and an X and an S. Would be ace to get something going.
Haha for sure, I don't even have enough screens but my dream is to own 8 small matching CRTs for Xbox Lans one day
I'm sure that's the reason, but it didn't stop them from making Halo 3, ODST, and Reach BC anyway. 3 and Reach are even Xbox One X Enhanced. It's just nice to have options. :)
More just great work by the backwards compat team to make this work, I believe the E3 where OG Xbox Back Compat was announced they even had LAN games setup between OG Xboxes and Xbox Ones?
I'd love to see them start adding more games to the list, especially OG Halo CE since MCC is based off the Gearbox PC port which introduced a lot of issues into CE.
Agreed. Semi-off topic but this gets at an issue that I have with a lot of remakes. Like for Resident Evil 2 remake how difficult would it have been for Capcom to include a pretty straight bare bones remaster of original RE2 with the remake? That sort of thing just feels like such an easy win for Capcom to me. Even if more companies at least did the SquareEnix thing of actively making old games available on current platforms would be nice.
Pretty cool MVG has been getting more attention lately here. Got into more of his videos not too long ago talking about how console security was broken, homebrew stuff or simply findings like this. Wonder if Xbox actually tested for this or it's just a happy coincidence ha.
I'm pretty sure they tested for it. It's been working across 1,360 and One platforms, so this just confirms it working on Series too.
MVG is a programmer and has extensive history in the dev seen on Xbox HomeBrew and lately on switch for HomeBrew. Dude is good stuff.
Your guess would be wrong. LOL No idea how you came to this guess tbh.
In regard to halo 1/2, running it in BC wouldn't still give people a view of how halo 1/2 looked like on CRTs it'll at least give people a way to see halo 1 in its near original form and let people play halo 2 campaign seamlessly without loads.
Halo1/2 MP is in much better shape these days on MCC so not as much is lost overall on the MP front. I'd still love to see the games get BC regardless just to have another console that I can play Halo 2 OG system link on, the 30fps warts and all
Halo1/2 MP is in much better shape these days on MCC so not as much is lost overall on the MP front. I'd still love to see the games get BC regardless just to have another console that I can play Halo 2 OG system link on, the 30fps warts and all
Care share then? Or were you just interested in judging me for getting something wrong?
Sorry, I wasn't judging you; just don't know how you could logically come to those conclusions even as a guess. Well the Halo 3 I could see. However I'm pretty certain Halo 3 was the first game used to test the Heutchy method to see if it actually worked and had nothing to do with "Also, I think they mostly made the 360 version of Halo 3 available on current Xbox consoles because the MCC was still in rough shape at the time so making 360 Halo 3 available was almost kind of a "make good" situation. ."
As far as the first part of your post: "my understanding is the BC team can get 360 games up and running on current Xbox consoles fairly quickly which isn't necessarily true of original Xbox games so I would guess that's a factor", where did you even get this from? You really think it's easier for the BC team to emulate 360 games on Xbox One hardware than OG Xbox games? LOL We're talking MS engineers with access to documentation for both systems and you guess that it's easier to emulate the more powerful last generation hardware of games that are larger in scale and scope, as well as coded more complex than it is to emulate the generation before that less powerful hardware of games that are smaller in scale and scope, as well as coded simpler?
There's a reason all OG Xbox games made BC also have the Heutchy method applied to them as well. Here's a hint, because it's easier.
Last edited:
That's pretty insane. Like the amount of people that will take advantage of it is probably a few thousand at the most, but the fact that they even took the time to make it possible is straight up ridiculous in the best way possible.
I still play og Xbox games online with xlink Kai on my Series X and play with friends one Xbox Ones, 360s and even og xboxes
Last edited:
I wonder if they'll ever find a way to get og Xbox games working online again. I imagine it's too big an investment for the relatively small number of Xbox online games.
I wonder if they could put an app like xlink kai on the xbox itself. All those games also had system link options, so you can still play them online with xlink kai, but it's a hassle for most people because you need to hard wire both your xbox and your pc into your router for it to work.
That would be a hilariously awesome way to achieve it. First we need some good Xbox cores running
There is an OG emulator running several games, just we need a core based on that emulator.
Back at the announcement of BC on XB1, they mentioned using azure servers for OG Xbox Live for BC games. Still waiting š¢
Remember that this is adding in another generation on top of that
I guess, but given That the Series consoles are for all intents and purposes "Xbox Ones" from a BC perspective, I just assumed.
LAN play/System Link has never needed gold on any generation of Xbox.
Kinda sorta. The original Xbox was of course based off Windows, and built with standard network architecture in mind for use over the Internet. So it's networking system is just Winsock, the same as it is on PC, and still is. And with that, because they aren't reinventing the wheel, all the communicate is done with a standard IPv4 implementation, the same thing you have on pretty much everything you own, and it's never changed.
So as long as IPv4 still exists, and you still have a valid DHCP service for it (I.e your router), system link just runs identically to how it always did. Their backwards compatibility doesn't need to do anything special (or anything at all?) to run it as it's all just, well, standard.
And after all, System Link is just a buzz word for LAN, it's identical to LAN games on your PC for the most part.
From my understanding, the Xbox One at least required you to have at least one of the systems in the LAN game to have XBLG, was that not the case?
Nope, that's seemingly never been the case. A properly implemented LAN mode can and is allowed to run completely offline. Halo MCC presently works this way for example.
The rules may be slightly different for crossplay LAN, though curiously Minecraft doesn't seem to require Gold for it.
Last edited:
Holy bananas.
This is beautiful, especially because the dream would be to use a projector. My college rents these conference rooms and they have high quality projectors (we did a smash party last year, it was amazing), I'm really tempted to see if I find a bunch of Xboxs and do a Halo Party....
I have never done Lan with Xbox, how many Xbox would you need to do a Lan party with 8 players? And 16?
patches were done by discs IIRC but since it wasn't to fix general bugs, it was more for critical errors... also there's no content changes... purely in executable/library
so in order to fix an older game, you'd put in a newer game and it'll likely have the patch for every game already on it
i know this was the case at one point but may have changed for liveaware titles or when xbox live took over the dashboard
though at the time halo 2 launched there was like 20 million xbox consoles in the wild and only like 2 million XBL members... so discs were still the most efficient way of fixing older titles (like KOTOR's game breaking bug for example)
Things like the Halo TUs may have been a separate update where the rules are changed but not the game itself.
I mean it depends on the game - but for the most part only Halo has 4-player splitscreen that you can combine with LAN, letting you do 16-players across 4 Xboxes. Everything in my post there is with 4 Xboxes.
Timesplitters 2/3 lets you do 16-player but only works on the original Xbox right now. Star Wars Battlefront II would theoretically let you do up to 32 players with 8 Xboxes which is insane. Otherwise most games max out at two players per Xbox or a single player per Xbox which is not that useful.
I was under the impression system link didn't require DHCP? It says on the website it can be done with just a hub/switch
THinking back on this I hope since dev tools are available in all series consoles we could theoretically update games that don't support multiplayer LAN to support it. That would be a great mod for those who still want to do that.
Hmm, technically that's true, though I've never had consistent results with it.