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Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol

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Re: Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol

#61

Post by CYR1X »

cglong wrote: post #13

It's a shame it's proprietary, but there's a neat service[1] that's been around for over a decade that reverse engineered System Link and similar protocols to make them Internet-enabled. [1]: https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/

It's just branded network tunneling software. They went through the effort of making friends lists and integrating IRC channel into it, but if any two people want to play each other there are a myriad of ways to tunnel local network traffic over IP. Here's one by the guy who created xemu:

https://github.com/mborgerson/l2tunnel

Re: Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol

#62

Post by CYR1X »

nmstoker wrote: post #33

I recall the game recording feature feeling pretty cutting edge at the time, as you could pause it and rotate/fly round the scene, it felt really fluid and responsive. I guess now it would be common place but back then it definitely seemed a little magical.

This was common in PC games at the time, but not on console games. Essentially you're just dumping game state memory somewhere and then replaying it. Half-life games had it.

Re: Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol

#63

Post by CYR1X »

loeg wrote: post #11

"age in a bot" might be a truncated form of "message in a bottle." The PRNG exponentiation scheme is essentially Diffie-Hellman. > Modifying the fire duration does not seem to have any effect Including, e.g., plasma pistol? Very cool investigation and writeup.

People have determined what the player structs are on the xbox-memory-state side of things, so my guess is "age_in_a_bot" might be the time elapsed for a given player aka how long they've been alive:

https://github.com/CYRiXplaysHalo/XboxHaloGameLogger/blob/ma...

Re: Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol

#64

Post by k8svet »

AgentME wrote: post #59
k8svet wrote: post #44

Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember,…

>Especially given the way MCC massacred Halo1 with the horrendous Halo 1 PC port back to Xbox, and then later to PC again. MCC launched in a terrible state, but it's had a crazy amount of deep improvements over the years and I think all of the big known issues of the original Halo PC port have been addressed since a few years ago.

No, it really hasn't. https://halobugs.com/ I have hundreds of hours in Halo 1 and play MCC regularly. Halo 1 PC players don't understand because these bugs originated in the original Xbox->PC port, and they've never known what it should actually feel like.

I mean hell, when they first launched MCC, fall damage jumping off the base in BG was wrong. You can feel the effect of the Gearbox port to this day. I mean, did they even fix the pistol spread issue? Not that that would be important or anything.

Re: Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol

#65

Post by k8svet »

auto wrote: post #55
k8svet wrote: post #44

Halo 1 + system link + XBConnect is responsible for a huge swath of my career, life, friendships. I remember sitting in my parents basement as a [very young person] marveling at XBC and wondering how it worked. I can still remember the layout of the webpage I found diving into the protocol, how discovery worked, broadcasting discovery packets to 0.0.0.1. I remember opening Ethereal and seeing the packets. I remember,…

j up, don't rush the count You're speaking my language friend, and honestly half of this reads like I could have written it myself. I was obsessed with video games and knew I wanted to be a programmer before CE, but H1 on XBC, combined with LANs in high school and thousands of hours of split screen in college truly laid the passion for "how does all this work" and my current career. I don't play CE as much, my double…

> j up, don't rush the count

You just put the absolute biggest grin on my face. HN was all worth it, somehow. And wow, am I not surprised to hear Squad Battle is your favorite. Somehow I'm sure we've played some games over the years.

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