Hidden Easter Egg in the Startup Animation

[hastings298]

 

OG Xboxers assemble! Come on guys, how has no one discovered what this Easter egg is? It's just a combination of button presses.

Additional info found on Reddit:

 

"That thread points out a section of the Xbox kernel's source code (which contains the startup animation code) which has checks to see if certain controller buttons are being pressed and then it conditionally fires functions to alter how the startup animation looks and behaves. The code has references to changing things like the presence of fog, shadows, the "blob" throbbing effect, and camera placement. There's references to "pause" and "camera under control", which makes me think you may be able to pause the bootup animation and then move the camera around the scene using the controller. The boot animation (and bootup sound) is rendered in real time in 3D and is not a pre-rendered video, which makes this all possible in theory.

The presence of this code in the stock kernel indicates that it might somehow be able to be triggered by a user on a stock Xbox, if triggered correctly. Currently, simply pressing buttons during the bootup sequence doesn't seem to have any effect. There might be some missing component to trigger all this.

Keep in mind, this is all speculation. Seamus could be referencing something else entirely for all we know. I also don't know for certain that the code in reference made its way into the final shipped kernel. It could have also been only present in certain versions hypothetically.

EDIT: the code that handles processing button inputs is not active in retail versions of the kernel from what I can tell. There's a special flag that is basically used to indicate whether or not the build is being used for testing. If this "final build" flag is turned on, inputs aren't processed. Seeing as how you can only do this on non-final development builds, I don't think this is the easter egg he's talking about. I'd still be curious to play around with it though. It looks like a very simple thing to enable so I'm surprised there isn't a version out there currently that has this feature enabled, especially hacked BIOSes. It looks like this is a rather trivial flag to set during compilation."