Significant progress made on Xbox 360 recompilation

The blog post reminds me of similar efforts with Shockwave. There's people building decompilers, and runtimes, and if you join enough Discords, you will notice the people in them are cross-contaminating between communities if you will, they share insights with one another, in their efforts towards specific goals. They're hyper focused on making one game or another come back. There's Habbo Hotel, and Coke Studios, as well as other games.

The Coke Studios effort is interesting because there were no "private servers" developed at the time, unlike Habbo which had many, and there are Shockwave Xtras that no open runtime supports currently.

There's several attempts at a full runtime as well, that run in-browser.

Projector Rays (decompiler) really was the biggest release to date, and recently people have been really hacking at it, to some extent AI has helped to reverse engineer bytecode far as I can tell.

For anyone curious, one of the runtimes is called DirPlayer:

https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs

Hey, that's my newsletter -- thanks for sharing! :D

Some exciting stuff has already happened in the week since I wrote the interview. Here's Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kih42KlocII

Very nice. It’d be interesting if recomps of some games that were originally for both 360 and PC become the superior experience… Fable 3 and the whole Games for Windows Live nonsense the PC version had come to mind.

These projects are really neat. Last week, I was able to build (and play) the Xbox 360 release of Sonic Unleashed on a couple of ARM SBCs using Sonic Unleashed Recomp.

Years ago I was searching for why emulators don't recompile to native bytecode and it seemed like the consensus at the time was that JIT etc was faster. I can't find it now, but IIRC I remember replies from maintainers saying it was a bad idea.

What changed since then, since this seems to be a trend? Is this more for more modern systems that have more static code?

What's the latest on homebrewing on the actual Xbox 360 these days?

What is Xbox 360 recompilation?

Crazy that it has taken so long. I understand these are small teams trudging off in the dark but you could have imagined there would have been more eyes on this and hands tinkering in the time when the Xbox 360 was being sold than today. Right at that same time in history the iPhone was getting cracked basically every iOS release, sometimes by teenagers. Seems like there were a ton of hackers around back then.