[HN Gopher] Morrowind rebooted the original Xbox ___________________________________________________________________ Morrowind rebooted the original Xbox Author : pmarin Score : 56 points Date : 2021-04-15 07:06 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (hackaday.com) (TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.com) | varsketiz wrote: | Wow, that's a cool hack. I wonder if they did more stuff like | that to go around Xbox limitations. Reminds me of Crash Bandicoot | hacks for ps1 :)) | ToFundorNot wrote: | For those who haven't read/watched it: | https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/war-stories-how-crash... | | It is indeed a story of creativity in design. | DicIfTEx wrote: | Complete with a cautionary tale about the dangers of being | _too_ creative: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/2 | 0131031/203788/... | bogwog wrote: | Wow. That story is going to give me nightmares. | hinkley wrote: | Presumably then if the game was glitching on you and you did a | save/load then the problem would magically fix itself. | | (have you tried turning it off and back on again?) | chews wrote: | that was a great post, typical fun exploitation to rid yourself | of the problem of memory management. There was a way to force | garbage collection in Flash as well that was used by the clever | pros at the time. | [deleted] | kashanjunaid wrote: | great hack! thanks for share | flatiron wrote: | His video on Monday was great about this. I like that they | checked first if they were running low on memory and then just | rebooted the darn thing if it was. | Impossible wrote: | This was common in console games and console SDKs had special | APIs to support this. It's a decent solution to memory leak and | fragmentation issues | thomasfromcdnjs wrote: | Great to see Morrowind on HN, just sharing my personal story; | | I was in highschool living in a trailer park with my mother. My | ma ended up getting a pay out from the government for a work | related injury. She bought me a PC and we set it up in the | caravan and I was able to run Morrowind. It was a great escape | from the conditions at the time and I kept learning programming | when I wasn't hunting Daedra's. | geuis wrote: | Video from Modern Vintage Gamer walking through the process of | how this worked along with a demonstration | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0TKwPnHc-M | simlevesque wrote: | This guy is the best video game tech youtuber out here. He | knows his stuff deeply. | Nextgrid wrote: | He was part of the original Xbox homebrew scene. | corysama wrote: | Yep. The function would reboot into a new executable without | disrupting what was on the screen. | | I don't recall which one, but this was used by an FPS to switch | between single-player vs. multi-player exes that were developed | by two completely different studios. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-15 23:00 UTC)