alt Hacker NewsGreat article and fantastic work, though the commitment to stick with the ancient DCC software of the era (genuinely admirable), is an immense amount of pain, for no real gain that I wouldn't dare to try. Modern Blender can be extended to import/export legacy formats like DirectX 8 .x and N64 Homebrew for example have great asset tools all working in modern Blender, with a big community behind them. FBX was originally a (Kaldera) MotionBuilder format only back in that era and 3ds Max support for it didn't come until around version 8/9.
I'd say there's a way to build a modern asset pipeline for the OG Xbox where you can leverage USD (well supported in all modern DCC), and then build tooling/viewers around it to process/split/export everything out to DirectX 8 .x in a much more manageable way. Makes artist collaboration a lot easier (modern tools with guardrails inplace), and can measure and keep metrics on everything (every KB counts with 64MB RAM).
All these old versions of Maya, 3ds Max and Visual Studio are just a total liability now. Licences for them can't be activated, and even if they can, it's a lot of backflips to get Autodesk to help. 3dsMax/Maya 8 and earlier barely work on Windows 10/11 now (Vista changed a lot for desktop apps) and even Visual Studio 2005 needed to be patched to support Vista!
FWIW Blender 5.1.2 (i.e. the latest one) can import and export DirectX .x files using an addon you can download from[0] (from inside Blender itself).
Though i'd stick with Blender 2.79b for such projects because Blender 2.8 (i think) switched to a PBR pipeline that looks "wrong" when targeting non-PBR renderers (in theory you can recreate the original shading using material nodes or whatever they're called, but setting up materials in modern Blender is already more involved than Blender 2.79b without taking nodes into account). Most of the tools you'd need for making game assets (mesh editing and UV editing primarily) haven't changed much anyway to the point where you can follow most Blender mesh editing tutorials with it :-P. I'm in a few retro gamedev Discord channels and apparently i'm not the only one using 2.79b because of the changes in 2.8+.
[0] https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/io-directx-x/?utm_sou...