The video includes side-by-side comparison between the original upscaled 480p and 720p. Around 7:00 you hear about what it takes to get 720p and maintain around 30fps gameplay. Not only a great article, but also a great video to summarize the changes needed get the higher resolution.

Edit , just started the video, I think it goes into this

This probably is a psychological disorder (usually mild and fun to have though) - an opposite counterpart of obsession with being among the first to buy the newest model of the most popular gadget. Both give a sense of superiority :-)

Take it up with some ITU dudes in the 1970s actually: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf

“The February 1980 note further suggested that the number of samples per active line period should be greater than 715.5 to accommodate all of the European standards active line periods. While the number of pixels per active line equal to 720 samples per line was not suggested until the next note, (720 is the number found in Rec. 601 and SMPTE 125), 720 is the first value that “works”. 716 is the first number greater than 715.5 that is divisible by 4 (716 = 4 x 179), but does not lend itself to standards conversion between 525-line component and composite colour systems or provide sufficiently small pixel groupings to facilitate special effects. Arguments in support of 720 were provided in additional notes prior to IBC in September 1980.

[…]

As noted above, Rec. 601 provided 720 samples per active line for the luminance channel and 360 samples for each of the colour-difference signals.

When the ITU defined HDTV, they stipulated: ‘the horizontal resolution for HDTV as being twice that of conventional television systems’ described in Rec. 601 and a picture aspect ratio of 16:9. A 16:9 picture ratio requires one-third more pixels than a 4:3 picture ratio. Starting with 720, doubling the resolution to 1440 and adjusting the count for a 16:9 aspect ratio leads to the 1920 sample per active line defined as the basis for HDTV [9].

Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1920 x (9/16) = 1080.

Progressive scan systems at 1280 pixels per line and 720 lines per frame are also a member of the ‘720-pixel’ family. 720 pixels x 4/3 (resolution improvement) x 4/3 (16:9 aspect ratio adjustment) = 1280. Accommodating the Hollywood and computer communities’ request for ‘square-pixels’, meant that the number of lines should be 1280 x (9/16) = 720.

Therefore, most digital television systems, including digital video tape systems and DVD recordings are derived from the 4:2:2 basic standard format. The 720 pixel-per-active-line structure became the basis of a family of structures (the 720-pixel family) that was adopted for MPEG-based systems including both conventional television and HDTV systems.”

DVD-sourced media can look great on modern displays if you…

– Encode at 720×540 slash 960×540 to avoid throwing away that extra horizontal detail, as most encoders do by crunching 4:3 video down to 640 (with pillarbars lol) × 480. Also to take advantage of integer-scaling to 1080/2160/etc which is especially beneficial on cheap TVs with crappy scalers.

— Deinterlace to double-FPS (60000/1001 fields-per-second for color NTSC) to avoid throwing away the actual benefit of interlacing in that sweet sweet motion detail. Most rippers crunch it down to 30FPS like Handbrake leads people to do.

— Convert the video to HD-standard color primitives, again to avoid cheap displays' poor treatment of SD colorspace. Chroma-subsampled video is already a little washed out by design and this can compound to make it look even worse.

Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes. Now consoles blow e-fuses and prevent downgrades on top of tons of other security enhancements.

Was a great read and trip back in time. Pair this with projects like Insignia launching Halo 2 support and its a great time for classic Halo 2.

One of the reasons I'm a software engineer today is because I could easily examine webpages to see how they work, tinker with the memory of programs, open up hardware to see what's inside (relatively low risk of destroying the device), and so forth. And yeah, back in the day of Halo PC, modding the levels taught me a lot about what goes into the game. Knowing what a "BSP" is can be a pretty useless piece of trivia, but it made me feel smart and capable of understanding more.

It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering. Software is way harder to crack/debug today; certainly not impossible, but the barrier of entry is much higher. Plus there's a ton of moving parts that go into getting software to work securely on not just mobile but modern desktops, adding another layer of hassle. You can still examine what a webpage is doing, but even that has changed significantly; so many websites today are div soup (yes, worse than in the early 2000s) to support JavaScript monstrocities that are also minified and obfuscated. When it comes to games, you can almost forget it in some cases because they're so heavily dependent on content streaming from servers. As far as hardware goes, you've either got to face various security hoops that can brick devices, use a heat gun to unglue the bezels on certain things, and face a lot more risk in permanent damage.

All of these changes were made for a reason, but we've also taken the fun out of everything. Even game modding really wasn't what it used to be in spite of some of the tools available today technically being better than those in the past.

But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work, largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.

There's definitely that element, but I also think something missed by compartmentalizing hardware "tinkering" to devices designed specifically for the task. Nothing about a Raspberry Pi, for instance, is mysterious. If a person is going to buy one, they already have a significant level of interest and base knowledge. A kid's not gonna have one lying around and get curious about it unless their parent is a geek who owns those things, and even then said kid may have no good reason to even bother with one. Practically nobody today is opening up their laptop or their phone to mod it or even just see what's inside. I'm not saying the modern situation is bad, but a significant amount of it is artificial in a way that wasn't when the devices one would play with were the devices actually being used, and it's not clear to me whether what we have now is actually better in regard to inspiring future generations. Engaging with one's everyday hardware is an exercise in the power process that fewer and fewer generations are experiencing.

Having a full-featured open-source game engine is great, but starting with that means starting at square one.

By obsessively enforcing copyright and "anti-cheat", we effectively bury the game-making process 6 feet underground. Every game is declared dead at the very moment of its release. Every decision its creators made up to then is set in stone. The game studio itself must exist in isolation, ignorant of the very world it is creating its games for.

It's no wonder that AAA studios are so out of touch with the people who play their games. Gamers are explicitly excluded from the creative process.

e.g. my friend tells me you can open game.exe in notepad + change this value to walk on lava, then I fiddle with it and tl;dr make a map of my school, then get frustrated with limitations and start learning a game engine with some practical background on what these concepts are etc.

vs. I decide want to make a game because that's cool, I buy a book on game programming, it depends on these libraries, I install them, I install a compiler, the libraries don't work with the compiler/each other, ......... and give up because the grit in my life is reserved for stuff other than video games.

... like really, what is the overlap of people that are really mind blowingly creative as artists, and the people that are super type A driven to go through all this frustration up front? less friction, more better art

[1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.

You can criticize where things has gone with MTX but I don't think that was a choice by the game developers. I also think it's a generational thing as you and I are now too old to spend all day fucking around with some game we played a ton. I'm sure the kids of today are tinkering with minecraft/fortnite/whatever replaced those games.

Also to me it's a bit of wanting to try and put the tooth paste back in the tube. When we were teenagers modding Halo we maybe didn't fully understand the impacts it had on the game's community and the overall experience. As an adult I just see how games like Call of Duty appear to be constantly losing the fight against hackers, and using over engineered matchmaking algos with SSBM to try and maximize the typical user's gameplay experience. But I can't regain my naivety and be one of the many younger adults who probably don't even really notice these issues, the way I didn't when I played Halo 3 on Xbox Live which had boosting, standby, and stealth servers.

Again I’m not saying you’re wrong. It just seems like the thing that’s always the most prime for screwing around with is the thing at the bleeding edge. There’s still some fun to have.

I read an extremely similar comment two decades or so ago about a dev saying that no-one would learn computers anymore because everyone now used GUIs instead of CLIs...

Yes modding might be harder nowadays, but you have things like Scratch and Hedy, or the freely available Unreal/Unity dev tools with asset stores.

That's easier it was later on Windows (which for 15 years was how 99% of people used computers) and anything after.

I agree and have the same feeling we've lost something as so much computer-centric tech has become relatively inaccessible in the name of 'security' (although much seems like efforts 'secure' business models or IP). As you observed, the tech has also evolved in ways which make it relatively undiscoverable through casual tinkering. Although perhaps we suffer from a generational perspective bias, I think there really was a 'golden era' of computer tech hobbyist accessibility and discoverability.

When Did the 'Golden Era' Begin?

I'd peg it as starting around the late Usenet era. Interestingly, there was definitely a time period in consumer computer tech when it was too early. I know because I started "too early" and missed being a teenager in the golden era because I got my first computer as a teenager in 1981. It was a Radio Shack Color Computer with 4K of memory, a 0.9 Mhz 8-bit 6809 processor and storage via an external cassette tape player. Fortunately, the ROM BASIC on that model was perhaps the most evolved 8-bit ROM BASIC Microsoft ever made (vs the early Commodore & Atari flavors) and Radio Shack did a fantastic job on the large, well-illustrated color manuals.

Unfortunately, 1981 was too early because no one in my family's extended social network had ever touched a computer. So, beyond the BASIC manual in the box, I was on my own with my new computer. While there were a few big magazines like BYTE on news stands, very little in them applied to my computer. I eventually discovered a couple of zine-style publications at a distant big news stand. Although they were essentially overgrown stapled newsletters printed in B&W, they became my lifeline because they had articles written by hobbyists more advanced than I, as well as mail-order ads for cassette tape-based software. This was the key that unlocked the mysterious realm of assembly language for me when I ordered a $12 homebrew monitor program written by some random guy who took out a classified ad. The local library didn't have any books relevant to my new microcomputer, local colleges only offered computer courses under the math dept and those were focused on mainframes and COBOL (I think back then 'real' CompSci was limited to Ivy League and top tier tech unis). Even large bookstores had nothing useful to me I could order other than Osborne's 6809 CPU book which was really an architecture and instruction set reference manual mostly incomprehensible to an isolated teenage hobbyist starting out.

A few years later 300 baud modems became cheap enough for hobbyists to acquire but it took another year or so for BBSes to emerge which were targeted at my computer (most BBSes prior to that were run on CP/M hardware and focused on one platform (not mine)). So dialing BBSes focused on my platform involved long-distance charges which meant short calls. Another year later FidoNet connected larger BBSes and national-level info began to circulate and my local hobby scene stayed pretty much like this for a few years. New info centered around zines, local computer club meetings, mailed tapes & diskettes and short BBS calls. Info was available but it was scarce and you had to work at getting it.

That's why I think the true golden era truly took off in the late Usenet period. That's when anyone could subscribe to a ~$10/mo service providing 1200 baud access to Usenet feeds in their local area code. Before that, unless you were at a university studying CompSci or worked at a uni or large tech company, Usenet was a magical land you only heard about on BBSes or at user group meetings. When random home hobbyists got direct access to the firehose of high-quality, global Nerdverse content that was the Usenet CompSci feeds it felt like the Enlightenment dawning. From there the transition to the early web was pretty natural since a lot of early tech-centric websites were much like a BBS ring. We didn't need search because they mostly linked to each other and people were running them as a hobby so few had ads other than maybe a sponsorship from an ISP or modem company (usually just paid in free service or hardware). Fortunately, the tech hobbyist web wasn't impacted much by the 2001 dot com crash since it was never about revenue. Up until the slow decline gradually started in the mid-2000s, it was pretty great - flashing BLINK tags and all. Honestly, we didn't even realize how good we had it, or imagine that it might someday end.

When Did the 'Golden Era' End?

Having lived through the pre-Golden Era, the early days and through the end, I think the seeds of the Golden Era's slow decline were planted when the modern web business began to emerge from the ashes of the dot com crash. Although things were still pretty hobbyist-discoverable in desktop OSes and the web through 2010-ish, troubling signs were on the horizon. For those paying attention, the rapid dominance of iOS in the late 2000s was ominous. Apple's business model required a walled garden app store and their concept of users was not as active explorers but as purely passive eyeballs for media and app-snacking. Even though a few app developers did well in the early app store, the fundamental model relegated them to the role of sharecroppers working Apple's farm with Apple's tools and selling only to Apple's store (with no access to their app's end-users).

In all, entry-level, home-based tech hobbyists got almost 20 really amazing years in the 'Golden Era' from roughly the late 80s to the late 2000s. It would be wonderful if in the distant future that period is known as "The First Golden Era" but right now it's hard to be optimistic. While there is still an enormous amount of hobbyist info available online and more emerging, it's in a context of equally increasing locked down areas and ever decreasing discoverability (though open source and Github-like sites are notable exceptions).

Maybe this is why retro computing and retro gaming are booming now with new people who never experienced it the first time. It's a place where that unique Golden Era ethos, vibe and community still exists. Last year I went to a local user group meeting for Amiga computers, which is what I had mid-80s to early 90s. I met a bunch of enthusiastic Amiga users who hadn't been born when I bought my first Amiga. It was strange to feel both "old" and "OG Cool" at the same moment but also heartening to feel that same open community vibe still beating. :-)

Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?

In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.

- Matchmaking. Almost all games at the time made you manually join lobbies, and now we take matchmaking for granted.

- Persistent party. You'd invite your friends to your party and then start the match-making process. During the whole process you could chat with your friends, and when the game ended, you were still a party and could talk to each other.

- Chat. Everyone had an Xbox Live headset which came with the service. So everyone was a participant of party chat, in-game team chat, and even "proximity chat" with the enemy. With Halo 2's chat systems + Xbox Live headset ubiquity, it was a highly social game.

- Split screen online. All of the above worked with playing with a friend in split screen. Your friend could come over and you could start Team Slayer matchmaking in split screen which was awesome—the game would have to find two more teammates—, and your guest could even chat. Something that could never be done on PC really.

These dominated the old "look for and join the server" model of past FPS and, frankly, I could never go back to that.

Gameplay wise, Halo 1 had most of the innovations that Halo 2 capitalized on but Halo 2 moved to the pure shield-is-your-health-bar system and removed health packs. After each battle you didn't have this scramble for a health pack just to get ready for the next confrontation, so the pacing was better than arena shooters imo.

Finally, Halo 2 didn't need to be the global first on each bullet point to be innovative. But it was probably the first game to have all these in one package. There was a lot of UX polish in setting this standard which you can tell because most games don't reach it even today.

I kept a list of "good" servers (based on ping, map rotation, who played there, mods, etc), but when they were empty finding somewhere else was a complete pain.

I miss the camaraderie on some of those dedicated servers, but I know I wouldn't be able to get into something like that these days.

I have a group that regularly plays Overwatch together every Friday. Whenever more than 5 people show up, we play custom games. The workshop is surprisingly powerful, so it even gives us some of the experience we used to get with mods for games like Quake and Unreal.

When we have 5 or fewer people though, we really appreciate the game's matchmaking, even though it is far from perfect. It is a lot better at creating balanced matches than any server auto-balance feature ever was, while always keeping us on the same team.

this is pretty much the only unanimous, uncontroversial absolute statement that can be made in the context of online gaming

Sure, it had tons of polish and was on consoles, but I never thought of it as genre defining.

One might even argue that the success of Halo is what forced arena shooters like Counter Strike and Team Fortress to evolve or die. There was more at stake after it released, and outside the competitive circles there wasn't much demand for the FPS equivalent of Wheaties.

Edit: I should also give a shout out to Tribes for hitting a lot of those same notes

That being said, I think Halo deserves commendation for bringing a lot to the mainstream without compromise. The same people that casually enjoyed Halo were probably not also playing Goldeneye or Arma in their free time. And marketing be damned, Halo is fun even today. Hopping in a match of CE makes me lament how little team-based shooters have progressed in the past 20 years.

Picking up a tank or a jeep is one thing, but going for controlling an aircraft carrier or a submarine? Even if the controls were really primitive, it felt amazing!

That last one was in other xbox live games before it, but Halo 2's Xbox Live brought online gaming to everyone's television room whereas before it was only on the computer.

The path from Quake or Perfect Dark -> Halo 2 was no great paradigm shift compared to the five above imo

In the time period you talk about modding consoles and games was hacking on the cutting edge. Before that you had the phone phreakers and even before that you had people who were seriously into radios.

I think its already happening with the current crop of LLMs, generative AI, and just all the various ML models that have been developed that and another generation has already started doing the same. Right now they are attempting to keep that locked behind corporate doors but we already have Llama locally thanks to a leak. Thats to say nothing of the budding AR that is also coming.

The idea of putting goggles on my head with a computer that makes up the story, graphics and projects them onto the real world would have sounded crazy to me when I was knocking people out of AOL chat rooms with a concon.

Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards.

Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities.

People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money.

Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.

Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway.

DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.

They did. For the next generation. They updated their model of "child safe".

DRM (and similar locks) is a plague over general purpose computing, and therefore our liberal democracies themselves.

I think we can all agree it's multiplayer was better than the current halo infinite.

2. Solders new CPU onto console only to discover its gpu bottle necked

3. Enables OCing the GPU on the original Xbox, only to run into memory bandwidth limits

4. Reverse engineers Halo 2 source code to set scaling to 720p or 1080p (output is interlaced to 1080i)

5. Speeds up the hard drive to faster load in textures

My god this man is more dedicated to Halo 2 than Bungie is to any of their IP today.

Remember how much they paid Peter Dinklage for his voice acting, and his character sounded absolutely phoned in, and lazy, to the point that they eventually had to replace it with much better voice acting by someone else who was cheaper

It's not really an Xbox at that point.

If one were to "push a Honda Civic to the limits" with an array of engine and suspension modifications, for purposes of discussion you're going to sound like you're just splitting hairs by asking "Is it really still a Civic, tho??", even if you could be technically correct.

The author has the right to title their content as they desire and you can just rewrite it as "Modding the OG Xbox to within an inch of its life" in your head...

This is in the context of XBox modding, where “original Xbox” should be interpreted to mean “not an XBox 360”. Halo 2 can run at higher resolutions on a 360, so clarifying that this was a modding project on the original Xbox is helpful.

You have to read it in context. It’s not literally about an unmodded Xbox, it’s a modding project and the target for the mods was an original Xbox.

This isn't true. It renders exactly the same as it does on the Xbox 360 but the scaler chip handles the higher resolutions.

We had that already, it's called "Halo 2 for Windows Vista!", and now we have MCC.

Granted, Halo 2 on Vista had way higher hardware requirements to run at 30fps in 720p I think, though most of that was just Vista overhead.

Actually it's worse again, they modified the Xbox kernel too!

This is really impressive work but it's also way more niche than the title wants you to believe.