Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#31

Post by projektfu »

I'm trying to think of a good use case for exploring the NT 3.5 source code but I can't really think of one. It had the Windows 3 user interface and a number of enterprisey things like telephony (TAPI) and UPS control, but was overall pretty bare-bones.

I remember a few quirks. I lacked a CD drive and borrowed one to install NT 3.51. When I gave the CD drive back, NT wouldn't boot. It turns out that it installs ATAPI.SYS if you have a CD, which won't boot without it. It installs ATDISK.SYS if you don't have a CD.

System administration was pretty clumsy. I really began to appreciate the text file based UNIX philosphy over the point-and-click Microsoft approach. I had been dual booting NetBSD and OS/2 2.1 before that.

Nonetheless it was solid compared to Windows 3.1 and 95. Perhaps being limited to what it was, it'd be easier to study the native api and how it was being accessed by the several subsystems (Win32, OS/2, POSIX). A much lighter version of NTFS was running on it. I remember at the time you needed a windows source license to write a filesystem driver. I was using Visual C++ 4.0. 100Mbit ethernet was fast for the time and I was a little jealous of people using 155Mbit ATM.

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#32

Post by temac »

saddlerustle wrote: post #22

Trash article. The Xbox code leaked in 2004 and was passed around extensively. You can find public download links from even ~2010. This was discussed in the popular 2005 CCC talk: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591... The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. XQEMU hasn't "str…

> The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch.

From the whole Win2k obviously not, and it is common for journalists to not be very precise, but at least the kernel seems to have tons of architectural similarities with the NT kernel, and I would not be surprised if it was a derivative?

https://xboxdevwiki.net/Kernel

I also found https://books.google.fr/books?id=-8YlaRclj2gC&lpg=PA603&pg=P... and that's pretty much what I expected. But nobody who knows the difference about kernel vs. whole windows OS think that they would take explorer.exe and random obscure IT stuff and so over, and 150k is not crazy big, but for a core OS kernel this is completely expected.

The high level API seems to be based on a subset of DirectX and even a few pieces of Win32, so that's not completely unrelated either. It's obvious that the GUI was not taken from Windows, that you won't be able to maybe install a printer and so over, and it is probable that tons of custom code was also written, but that does not make the relationship disappear completely.

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#33

Post by Lammy »

als0 wrote: post #13
thiagocesar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft already has a pretty sophisticated Xbox emulator, deployed to both Xbox360 and XboxOne.

It's a shame that they whitelisted such a small selection of titles (on 360).

At least it’s easy to patch out if you have a homebrew-enabled 360.

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#34

Post by thristian »

jsmith45 wrote: post #28
cdolan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be thinking of Nintendo. They packaged up a Super Mario ROM from the internet and sold it on their classic games store. https://youtu.be/zR1uEwjx7VI

That proof is utter nonsense. Sure Nintendo might have just downloaded the rom, but they may have: 1) just concatenated the prg and chr roms and added an iNES header so they could validate in third party emulators. (Likely extra helpful for games where they were developing anti-epilepsy patches, since third party emulators have some really nice debugging tools.) or 2) Used a third party cart dumper that adds the iNES…

or

3) hired one of the iNES developers to develop their emulator, who kept using the file-format they were familiar with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#35

Post by klodolph »

temac wrote: post #32
saddlerustle wrote: post #22

Trash article. The Xbox code leaked in 2004 and was passed around extensively. You can find public download links from even ~2010. This was discussed in the popular 2005 CCC talk: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/attachments/591... The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. XQEMU hasn't "str…

> The Xbox OS isn't "a custom version of Windows 2000". They took the networking stack and a couple other bits from NT, but otherwise it was built from scratch. From the whole Win2k obviously not, and it is common for journalists to not be very precise, but at least the kernel seems to have tons of architectural similarities with the NT kernel, and I would not be surprised if it was a derivative? https://xboxdevwiki.…

The scheduler is radically different and that has knock-on effects on the rest of the OS. The OS gets a fixed time slice every frame before control is handed back to the game. The security model is engineered to distrust the user of the device as an anti-piracy measure.

It might be a derivative, but calling at a “custom version of Windows 2000” is absolutely wrong.

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#36

Post by LoSboccacc »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #30
avereveard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 is just layers built on top of layers all the way back to nt, you have to remove stuff instead of adding it to make it better. the funniest part is that you can have literal archeological expeditions from the menus, each click bringing you further back in its history https://i.imgur.com/K0xEDaN.png you can get back to components so old that are out of the new styling as well, taking the right turns: https:…

Let's also not forget this amazing jewel: http://i.imgur.com/48S59Xm.png Straight from Windows 3.x :-)

:-) good catch, the oldest legacy I knew from 8 was the "advanced appearance" menu, but they removed it in 10

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#37

Post by jaywalk »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #19
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little chance of that. They still haven't even fixed the start menu search. I open up the start menu, type 'vlc', and get no matches. I close the menu, reopen it, and try again. This time, it finds VLC no problem. They've had almost 5 years to fix this.

The most annoying thing in Windows 10 is the damned file explorer jumps three seconds after you have just opened it and clicked on a folder. Makes you have to reposition the view a second time.

I've never seen this before.

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#38

Post by lutte »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4
BruceEel wrote: post #3

What if a Microsoft developer gets her/his hands on the leaked NT 3.5 code and secretly starts working on setting Windows 10 straight...

Little chance of that. They still haven't even fixed the start menu search. I open up the start menu, type 'vlc', and get no matches. I close the menu, reopen it, and try again. This time, it finds VLC no problem. They've had almost 5 years to fix this.

What mystifies me is that the core of the OS is actually pretty good. I've never had any issue like a blue screen since a decade ago. The kernel and driver subsystems are rock solid. Had a few occasional GPU driver crashes but those are mostly the fault of the driver devs and they don't cause a system reboot since Vista.

Why is the userland so bad in comparison? are they employing much worse developers to take care of the windows explorer/search/browser side of things? it is true that if you really try to pay attention you will notice many quirks and bugs here and there in the user interface interactions, with the start menu search being such a horribly visible offender (also bugs in the explorer search box).

Microsoft managed to make a uniform looking user interface for both win9x and XP/Vista/7, why are they having so much trouble with Windows 10 control panels?

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#39

Post by MaxBarraclough »

lutte wrote: post #38
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little chance of that. They still haven't even fixed the start menu search. I open up the start menu, type 'vlc', and get no matches. I close the menu, reopen it, and try again. This time, it finds VLC no problem. They've had almost 5 years to fix this.

What mystifies me is that the core of the OS is actually pretty good. I've never had any issue like a blue screen since a decade ago. The kernel and driver subsystems are rock solid. Had a few occasional GPU driver crashes but those are mostly the fault of the driver devs and they don't cause a system reboot since Vista. Why is the userland so bad in comparison? are they employing much worse developers to take care o…

Agree that Windows 10 seems to get the difficult stuff right. Stability, security, advanced graphics infrastructure, and very impressive backward compatibility with old binaries. Also agreed that the new control panels are a trainwreck, offering no advantages whatsoever over the old control panels they're trying to (very gradually) replace.

It's also incredibly bloated. Gone are the days when a few gigabytes would be enough for your Windows partition.

Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online

#40

Post by deelowe »

thiagocesar wrote: post #5
lawl wrote: post #2

I'm starting to think leaking the code for an old console could be a pretty cost-effective way to get an emulator. I'm pretty sure I've heard of companies using open source emulators for backwards compatibility with old consoles/selling 'classic games' before.

Microsoft already has a pretty sophisticated Xbox emulator, deployed to both Xbox360 and XboxOne.

Is it actually an emulator or something more akin to WINE?
Post reply on HN