Insignia Project Aims To Resurrect Xbox Live For the Original Xbox (kotaku.com) 19
Last week, Kotaku reported on a new project, called Insignia, "that aims to recreate the original Xbox Live service, potentially restoring online play to many dozens of classic Xbox games that fell offline when the original Xbox Live service closed on April 15, 2010." From the report: The project's announcement on the r/originalxbox subreddit came from SoullessSentinel, a screen name of one Luke Usher. Usher is well known in the vintage Xbox community as the lead developer of Cxbx-Reloaded, arguably the most advanced PC-based emulator of the 2001 Xbox hardware. (Microsoft's classic console has proven notoriously tricky to emulate over the years.)
As a demonstration of Insignia's progress, Usher shared a video depicting the creation of a new Xbox Live account via the Xbox's system UI. It's a cool trick, as this process has not been technically possible since the online service's April 2010 closure. (In a cheeky touch, the video names the newly created account HiroProtagonist, the Gamertag of Xbox co-creator J Allard.) Insignia will work with normal, unmodded consoles, provided the user can perform a one-time process to retrieve their unit's internal encryption keys. Long-existing Xbox soft-mod techniques, which require physical copies of exploitable games like Splinter Cell or MechAssault but do not necessarily alter the console's hardware or operating system, should suffice for accomplishing this key retrieval. Once that initial setup's completed, Usher envisions a more or less vanilla Xbox Live experience, complete with matchmaking, voice chat, messaging, and almost everything else you might remember. (One exception would come in a lack of proprietary game DLC, which Insignia and its developers lack rights to distribute.) Anti-cheating measures are also in the works, as well as reporting and banning mechanisms for truly bad actors. The project works by using a DNS man-in-the-middle maneuver to redirect all of Xbox Live's original server calls to new addresses that point to Insignia's work-in-progress infrastructure.
"The current plan is for Insignia to be a centralized service run by Usher and associates," reports Kotaku. "He believes keeping it centralized will prevent player populations from diluting across multiple third-party servers, and that it will not be much of a resource burden." "The server," he noted, "is used for authentication, matchmaking, storing friends lists, etc. but actual game traffic is usually P2P between Xboxes, so the requirements for our server are pretty low."
As a demonstration of Insignia's progress, Usher shared a video depicting the creation of a new Xbox Live account via the Xbox's system UI. It's a cool trick, as this process has not been technically possible since the online service's April 2010 closure. (In a cheeky touch, the video names the newly created account HiroProtagonist, the Gamertag of Xbox co-creator J Allard.) Insignia will work with normal, unmodded consoles, provided the user can perform a one-time process to retrieve their unit's internal encryption keys. Long-existing Xbox soft-mod techniques, which require physical copies of exploitable games like Splinter Cell or MechAssault but do not necessarily alter the console's hardware or operating system, should suffice for accomplishing this key retrieval. Once that initial setup's completed, Usher envisions a more or less vanilla Xbox Live experience, complete with matchmaking, voice chat, messaging, and almost everything else you might remember. (One exception would come in a lack of proprietary game DLC, which Insignia and its developers lack rights to distribute.) Anti-cheating measures are also in the works, as well as reporting and banning mechanisms for truly bad actors. The project works by using a DNS man-in-the-middle maneuver to redirect all of Xbox Live's original server calls to new addresses that point to Insignia's work-in-progress infrastructure.
"The current plan is for Insignia to be a centralized service run by Usher and associates," reports Kotaku. "He believes keeping it centralized will prevent player populations from diluting across multiple third-party servers, and that it will not be much of a resource burden." "The server," he noted, "is used for authentication, matchmaking, storing friends lists, etc. but actual game traffic is usually P2P between Xboxes, so the requirements for our server are pretty low."
P2P? (Score:2)
Increasing numbers of providers are enforcing CGN on their users out of necessity, the P2P traffic may not work.
The xboxone supports ipv6 and recommends it for this reason, but i'm pretty sure the original does not and neither does the 360.
enough to make this worth while? (Score:2)
Re: enough to make this worth while? (Score:1)
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Well, there's enough for people to be interested in doing it, either for intellectual challenge or for fun.
The number of real players is limited, but for those inter
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I loved my original Xbox . . . , but really are there enough people that still use an original Xbox to make this effort anything more than a experiment for a handful of people?
I don't know, but I have mine hooked up, and my kids are working through the back catalog based on what is age-appropriate. Shutting off Xbox Live for the original Xbox was about M$ forcing people onto the 360 which was losing so much money due to the recalls because it was a poorly designed piece of garbage.
My original Xbox is almost 17 years old and it's still going strong, and there are a ton of games available on eBay. I hope that this gets working. There's really no reason for a company with as many r
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M$
Sorry, stopped reading there. Get a grip.
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" (Score:2)
Microsoft began as a publisher of BASIC interpreters for microcomputers, in which all string variables' names ended with a dollar sign. Only very recently did Microsoft decide to end new feature development for BASIC [slashdot.org], and decades after the infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists", Microsoft has begun distributing its old GW-BASIC as free software [slashdot.org].
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No, it was improving Live service for the vast majority of players - a quarter million users versus 10,000 or so at the time.
Remember, even the vast majority of OG Xbox players were playing on the Xbox360. When you played an OG Xbox game using backwards compatibility, it ran the OG Xbox OS, including the OG Xbox Live librar
We need AAA FOSS Games and Services. (Score:2, Informative)
The great age of gaming studios is over, AFAIAC. ActiBlizz and EA are cynical corps, devoid of any soul and games that don't rake in piles of Free-to-Play 'micro' transactions are eventually shut down, the sourcecode locked away or discarded.
I don't like this.
I would love to donate to some Apex Legend / Tribes / Unreal Tournament clone/mixup that is free open source from A to Z, to ensure that game never goes away. Xonotic, Warsow and the likes are neat and run on today toasters and thermostats - which is e
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AAA vs Free (Score:3)
The problem, is that AAA games also imply AAA level assets and polishing.
Which usually means that artists need to be paid. Which means money. Which kind of restricts the possibility of free.
It's not necessarily impossible:
- Back during Carmack's tenure, id has regularily open sourced their older engines, meaning that it's possible to port to anything under the sun, as long as you pair the FOSS code with either free demo assets, or from a paid media.
- Some project get funded through patronage or crowdfunding
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I wonder about cheating with open source games. Obviously if you have the source it's trivial to create a modified client.
I guess the other problem is that AAA games cost many tens of millions to produce. Maybe a shareware model like we had back in the 90s could work, game binary and first few levels are free and then you have to pay for the rest of it.
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I wonder about cheating with open source games. Obviously if you have the source it's trivial to create a modified client.
I think there are a few solutions to this. First, is that an OSS multiplayer game implies an OSS server component, be it a dedicated server or a function of the game itself. To that end, the odds of everyone being impacted is far lower, since there would be lots of smaller servers instead of a single-point-of-exploitation. Those smaller servers, however, could do something like send back access files that contain a public key to the particular server, that also handle the reporting, so that one can only com
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And living in the future means repeating history again and again. Move on but keep looking over your shoulder.