Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video]

Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by Dwedit on Monday July 08, 2024 @02:10PM (#40907746)

The real question is if this will stop Morrowind from secretly rebooting the XBOX at certain load screens.

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by jsheard on Monday July 08, 2024 @03:01PM (#40908316)

Probably not, at least not without hacking the game. Typically only things which were built to use the extra RAM see any benefit, whether that's homebrew, leaked game betas which rely on the extra RAM that devkits had, or games made for the Sega Chihiro arcade platform which was basically an Xbox but with double the RAM.

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by Arrath on Tuesday July 09, 2024 @03:03AM (#40913260)

There was a great article here a few months ago on this very subject, detailing getting Halo 2 to run in true HD, properly using the extra RAM of the devkit, and the engine hacks required to do so (since it basically statically allocated a handful of regions and couldn't dynamically go "oh look more RAM!"). It was a good read!

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by Night_Thastus on Monday July 08, 2024 @02:36PM (#40908046)

Modders have done some incredible work optimizing and bug-fixing Morrowind over the years. I'm curious if someone could mash all of that together and 're-pack' an Xbox version of the game that ran way smoother.

Completely pointless? Yes. Interesting? Also yes!

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by hermitdev on Monday July 08, 2024 @04:58PM (#40909619)

Are you kidding? It's a Bethesda game, of course it won't fix any bugs. It's 2024 and the exact same sort of issues exist in Skyrim and Fallout 4 (even after the remasters/anniversary editions)!

I've run into issues recently (in June) with Fallout 4 where if your saved game data starts approaching 2GB on Xbox One x, saving the game will fail in weird ways (may hang the game, may crash the game). Once the game gets in this state, I'm not even able to launch the game without it hanging. Have to delete local game data, resync your saves from Live and pray you didn't lose more than a few minutes of gameplay.

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by donatj on Monday July 08, 2024 @05:17PM (#40909812)

I mean in this case, it's not a bug, it's a feature. The original Xbox had a feature where you could reboot and directly launch a binary while an image remained in the framebuffer.

Throw up a loading screen and secretly reboot.

Morrowind used this to silently reboot the Xbox to free memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0TKwPnHc-M

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by malobre on Monday July 08, 2024 @05:43PM (#40910051)

I remember buying Skyrim VR, only for it to be unplayable without modding because the physics is tied to the FPS and anything above 60 Hz would send objects flying everywhere (including the carriage in the intro sequence).

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by gregoryl on Monday July 08, 2024 @08:33PM (#40911372)

Sounds like a Bethesda feature to me. Morrowind was a fun game in its own right, but the outright janky stuff you could do was the main reason I loved it.

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by DaoVeles on Monday July 08, 2024 @05:31PM (#40909945)

Being Morrowind, this xbox is only about 2TB away from handling the memory leaks. ;)

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Re:Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video] by widowlark on Monday July 08, 2024 @06:37PM (#40910507)

https://kotaku.com/morrowind-completely-rebooted-your-xbox-d...

For those who don't know

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