dust08

Oh nice. I see still issues with the 720p patch. Hopefully you get the compressor working so we can see it in game. I'm worried about memory issues with the maps on the xbox, I know they had to cut up the original HL2 campaign into smaller sections and add load screens.

Found the video I was thinking of:

Sounds like he has it running on the old pc version but just needs a tool to convert to the xbox format? I know that the xbox version could have pc maps imported but they had issues with lightmaps and textures not displaying correctly that I've never seen a solution too. I would love to see a video or some screenshots as well.

Ah that explains why it hasn't been working for me. Unfortunate, hopefully you get updated python, tls, ssl, etc working.

90% complete? Wow! Orange box on the xbox would be incredible. Amazing work wish I could help but know nothing about the .XZP files. You could try asking in the XboxDev discord lots of knowledgeable people there. https://discord.gg/WxJPPyz

Oh I'll keep messing with it but I'll probably slow down some now, I'm pretty limited with what Alpine has since their 32 bit target seems to be pentium 4 or higher and we are on pentium 3. I would need to set up an alpine dev environment for compiling apks from source to get more apps working which would be a big learning curve... or I might look into other distros that have better pentium 3 support like antix, arch 32 bit, t2 linux, etc. but then it would be difficult to squeeze them into the cache partitions and a tar archive for the hacked up boot method I'm using. I think my favorite option is to look into doing an embedded Gentoo their portage package manager makes it so easy to compile from source with the proper flags, make custom ebuilds, a bin host etc. Just need to look into stripping it down for the space constraints. Another issue right now is I can't figure out audio. I'm starting to think it needs a kernel level patch which is a bit beyond me but I'm learning some basic coding now and understanding how to read it better, maybe I'll try and find the old xbox linux patches and see how they fixed Alsa.

What resolution are you in? I have it set up to paint to the same framebuffer as xromwell/cromwell set up, so whatever dimensions the boot screen is at will be what you get for Alpine as well. The background is a 4:3 one since that's what I was using it on, you can grab a 16:9 one and just name it wallpaper(although I thought I had it set up to auto scale), then put it in the alpine folder to change it. As far as windows going off the screen that's why I had to use fluxbox, you can hold ALT then click and drag it back onto the screen so you are able to resize to where it fits, everything these days is set up to default for 1080p or higher resolutions so most will launch outside the screen like that. If you right click and remember size on the window then it should remember the dimensions the next time it launches. Edit: just to be certain I just tested in 720p and got the same issues with part of the start menu and background being cut off you described. I fixed it by going into the MS dash turning on 720p then turning off 480p and 1080i , left on normal mode. I now get the proper screen size.

Awesome! Alpine has a huge package repository, a lot need sse2 instructions though... so if you get anything crashing with illegal instruction, SIGILL that's the reason. If you want to more permanently install you can create a G drive then write down the starting sector of it (can find in XBpartitioner in hexidecimal so will need to convert) then remove the G drive and set up a loop partition to run fdisk on with losetup -Pf --offset <offset in bytes which is sectors times 512> /dev/sda. The drive will be on the first loop device available which would you can show by just entering losetup with no arguments. Just run fdisk /dev/loop<number> and you can partition and install whatever distro you want to it as long as you have a rootfs tarball you can extract to it. Gentoo handbook gives you good instructions that can be generalized to other distros. You would probably need to make a custom initramfs though and feed it a custom init script to mount your loopback root because I'm not sure if any tools like dracut support a loopback boot with offset out of the box.

So I tested boot over and over again and still hit the tar short read error once. So seems that sometimes for unknown reasons it just fails to make it still but ah well just reboot if you get an error and try again I guess.

Just found this thread and got the toonami streams working. This is awesome! Anyone know anything else similar or other good .strm files? Also I'm amazed that kodi plug ins still work with xbmc... anyone could point me towards a good repo and instructions on how I would get these into xbmc4xbox like above?

Well I got a report of someone successfully booting on a 64mb box! Hurray! However they don't have a mouse and keyboard so just fyi you do need a usb cable with mouse and keyboard. And I should have posted before but username is "user", and password is "xbox".

Oh wow you can bump the resolution up to 720p! And options to change video from mp4 to avi and mp3, also sync with subscriptions? But that button seems to not do anything. Trying different settings the only thing that seems to work for me is 360p videos and mp4, nothing else will launch. Edit: nevermind some videos work in 720p but I guess if it doesn't have 720p for that video it just doesn't load and gives no feedback. Getting 15fps with 720p mp4 on 824mhz avi is about 4fps slower so mp4 is the container to use it seems like

Hey man I had finally got my xbox fixed but have been mostly trying to get Linux up and running on it. Finally got around to testing this and wow! Amazing work! Testing it now on a 128mb box running at 824mhz overclocked. Watching movie trailers! John Wick 4 looks like it's gonna be awesome.

Alright another version here. I changed up a good bit on the initramfs, everything else is the same. I'm 90% sure this should finally boot now on 64mb xboxes. Sorry about the long startup and shutdown times but maybe I can try squashfs or some other solution in the future and see if I can speed things up. Please give it a try if anyone can: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14C07TJ1an-kwCVvnBnN5vcLLIeKckfSj/view?usp=sharing

Ok I think I might have figured it out through some testing. I managed to recreate the error even on my 128mb box by stressing the memory in the initramfs. Seems there is some odd behavior with the fuse driver and virtual memory/memory managment that leads to the tar failing to extract/corrupting,or being truncated even with lots of swap, difficult to diagnose exactly what's going on... seems it might have to do with dirty pages or io contention? It even happened with the unchanged initramfs on about 1 out of 50 boots with 128mb of ram. I'm curious if with enough attempts it would eventually boot on a 64mb box because it seems to vary where it fails each time around. So my next idea is to use yet another cache drive to move the archive too before extracting so it can use a filesystem in the kernel should be much more stable, a lot easier than troubleshooting fuse or fatxfs. Also found a way to free another 10mb ish of memory once the initramfs loads which should help. Still pretty busy but I'll try and make the changes and upload when I can If anyone has a 128mb box could you test just to make sure it's at least booting on other 128mb systems? Edit: looking at your screenshot @KaosEngineerI'm wondering if the way the drive is partitioned or bios patched for partitioning makes a difference i.e. the LBA48 patch, XBpartitioner tables, Titan, Cerbios, stock with the f takes all 137gb limit, etc. there's a lot of different ways of formatting the drives, I don't understand completely what fatxfs supports, if anyone understands the code maybe could look into it? https://github.com/mborgerson/fatx I'm on ind-bios with the LBA48 patch and a XBpartitioner table

I've been thinking of doing the same for the xbox lol. Might be difficult with needing to compile without sse2 though, I need more practice with with setting up the toolchain from scratch with all sorts of custom flags.

I'm guessing that it must still just be due to 64mb vs. 128mb ram on my xbox. So I'll try and shrink the size of the kernel and initramfs even further, maybe see if I can free more memory once the initramfs is loaded as well. I'm going to be pretty busy with work the rest of the week but I'll try and compile a new kernel and make a new kernel this weekend, I need to make a new kernel anyways because this one is definitely not as optimized as it could be.

I'm using the newest version of xromwell, cromwell won't work on my openxenium, it shouldn't matter but good idea to eliminate any other variables. You reminded me I forgot to put the apps/linux folder in the place on e folder this time with xromwell.

Sure I could, probably not today though. Wouldn't be able to tell me what to change would you?

Ok I re downloaded the rootfs archive zipped it and uploaded it to onedrive this time, see if this works: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aqa_9itvwuqahPFStl3QkWC7__sfGQ?e=yrXEPB

Ok I just downloaded from my google drive and extracted and seems like something is wrong with the archive, unless the extraction tool I'm using on my windows laptop isn't opening it right. EDIT: nevermind seems like the archive is good on the google drive. Wish I had a 64mb console to test on, hopefully someone else can test just to confirm.

hmmm well made it further that time it looks like. How strange, invalid tar magic usually means that the archive is corrupted, probably not anything memory related now. What size is the rootfs.tar.gz showing as in the alpine folder on your e drive? Is there any way it could be getting corrupted when transferring to your xbox? Or I wonder if somehow it's getting corrupted uploading to google drive...

Alright here is the new version if you could test on your 64mb xbox @Natetronn . This version has a file manager, image viewer, text editor, and working netsurf added. Netsurf is running through sdl without gtk in it's framebuffer mode so window sizes are fixed and can't be resized, I added a 480p and 720p window size for it to the menu in fluxbox. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19dCXbFyQf264aQhdJacTHJXgqQH-Fc2N?usp=sharing

I'm getting around it by using one of the 750mb cache drives to put the rootfs in instead of ram, using another cache drive as swap, and using zswap to compress pages in ram, also tweaked some sysctl settings for low memory. Going to upload a new version shortly it does take a while to boot and shutdown as it's grown pretty large now with all the gui apps I've included.

Once the rootfs decompresses and it switches to it I have it make a swap currently but that's after the initramfs so going to change it to set up swap earlier in the process. Hopefully this won't significantly slow down the boot process.