XBMC4Xbox

So I've been having a play lately with my rgh 360 xbox and started playing around with Linux on the box. This was all done for pure curiosity and to learn a thing or two about Linux along the way. I take no credit for the following as I got most of the info from the Kodi forum and free60 sites but had fun seeing how far I could get.

After finally finding the correct files from the free60 site I was able to boot Ubuntu 11.10. I ended upgrading to 12.04 but that broke the video driver.
Figured out how to compile the driver on 12.04 and was back up with a working video driver. The problem I had with 12.04 was I kept getting system errors popping up after the update that I was never able to resolve

Next I went on to seeing if I could build a more recent build of XBMC (Kodi) for PowerPC and with a few modifications to what I found at this link: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid ... ux+powerpc

I used the following dependencies:

apt-get install automake autopoint bison build-essential cmake curl cvs default-jre fp-compiler gawk gdc-4.4 gettext git-core gperf libasound2-dev libass-dev libboost-dev libboost-thread-dev libbz2-dev libcap-dev libcdio-dev libcurl3 libcurl4-gnutls-dev libdbus-1-dev libenca-dev libflac-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype6-dev libfribidi-dev libglew-dev libhal-dev libhal-storage-dev libiso9660-dev libjasper-dev libjpeg-dev liblzo2-dev libmad0-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libmodplug-dev libmpeg2-4-dev libmpeg3-dev libmysqlclient-dev libogg-dev libogg-dev libpcre3-dev libplist-dev libpng-dev libpulse-dev libsamplerate-dev libsdl-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libshairport-dev libsmbclient-dev libssh-dev libssl-dev libtiff-dev libtinyxml-dev libtool libudev-dev libusb-dev libvdpau-dev libvorbisenc2 libxmu-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libxslt1-dev libxt-dev libyajl-dev mesa-utils nasm pmount python-dev python-imaging python-sqlite swig unzip yasm zip zlib1g-dev

I was able to compile Kodi 'Helix' 14.2 but was never able to get past the initial boot screen before getting a core dump error and it crashed. I think it was the built in ffmpeg that it compiles that it had problems with.








So gave I up on that and noticed on the software center for 12.04 build there is a XBMC build listed and I installed it on a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 (got pretty good at fsarchiver to make snapshots of my builds at different points).

It installed fine and boots up perfectly! It's an older 'Eden' 11.0 build but everything works but VERY slow due to software rendering. Still didn't like the fact that I have the system errors that I could not resolve with 12.04 so I went back to 11.10 to see if it was in the software center but it wasn't..

So next I went on to use the following files from http://www.deb-multimedia.org/ :

libavcodec52_0.7.17-dmo1_powerpc.deb
libavfilter1_0.7.17-dmo1_powerpc.deb
libavformat52_0.7.17-dmo1_powerpc.deb
libavutil50_0.7.17-dmo1_powerpc.deb
libpostproc51_0.7.17-dmo1_powerpc.deb
libshairport1_1.2.1~git20120110.aeb4987-2.squeeze1_powerpc.deb
libswscale0_0.7.17-dmo1_powerpc.deb
libx264-118_0.118.2085+git8a62835-0.1+1_powerpc.deb
xbmc_11.0-0.squeeze2_all.deb
xbmc-bin_11.0-0.squeeze2_powerpc.deb
xbmc-data_11.0-0.squeeze2_all.deb
xbmc-skin-confluence_11.0-0.squeeze2_all.deb
xbmc-standalone_11.0-0.squeeze2_all.deb

This gave me a fully working XBMC 11.0 on Ubuntu 11.10 with no system error problems but of course VERY slow due to software rendering.















So there you go XBMC on XBOX360! Albeit an older build heheh...

Nice job there was info on running it in linux about ages ago, sadly I don't think there will ever be hardware acceleration tor get it working properly.

mplayer runs quite well from xell I have used it to play the odd movie maybe you could combine the two some how and get a semi working setup.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing about mplayer - I tested it out in native Ubuntu and it ran quite well!

I believe this is what the original Xbox is based on too as a player and it still works quite well.

If we are able to archive this level of decoding on original Xbox with only software decoders we should be able to optimize a lot on the 360.

Yeah too bad this wasn't discovered back when people were still working on Linux for Xbox 360 - technically it should have been possible since those ppc ports were out for Debian.

Still it was good fun for a Linux beginner!

Great work .

Very clever. Might do this on my 360 that im about to R-JTAG+

GhostlyGamer wrote:Very clever. Might do this on my 360 that im about to R-JTAG+

I found good results with rgh1.2 on the phat consoles also a lot cheaper than r-jtag.

I've had one for years and never mentioned it here I like the old XBOX way better.

In fact I had a modded 360 before ever modding an old reliable Xbox. I'm active in the Xbox scene mainly because of XBMC.

My modding experience started as a simple disk tray mod on the 360 Elite. CPU key was banned in the "first wave" while playing World at War. My mistake personally was playing the leaked development copy of Fallout 3 months before release. I thought I had taken enough precautions...

I just RGHed it to remove ping limit after that. I have been on Kai/LiNK ever since.

My hat is off to your continued tinkering on this project. I owe you the courtesy of trying this out. Thank you

My original Xbox's are still going strong with XBMC being the reason I modded them in the first place. I did an rgh shortly after the first glitch chips came out on a slim Trinity that I picked up for $35 due to a busted DVD drive. My hope was homebrew would kick in more and we'd have an XBMC port shortly after but it never came..

But there have been many projects that have gotten some use out of the GPU at a low level - for example: https://github.com/LibXenonProject/mupe ... /xenos_gfx

From my understanding the only thing really missing is a way to port this to openGL or such.

So my hope with posting my efforts so far is that maybe someone with more experience and knowledge in these things could lend a hand and look at what it might really take to finally get a proper port of XBMC to Xbox 360 - after all Xbox is where it all began!

I realize there is not any real motivation any more with all the Android players out there but hey maybe there is still enough interest amongst the sceners and something might come of this. If not it was fun anyway!

So a big limitation that I've found with Linux on the Xbox 360 seems to be that the processor is limited to 1GHz with the current state of the builds. There is no dynamic scaling set up.

This is the big reason everything is running so slowly under software rendering. A 3GHz processor should be capable of caring the load on its own without the GPU.

I'm going to try and build a kernel enabling CPU scaling and see what comes of it.

the xell loader has speed state select you need to edit the config file, but I don't know if that effects Linux after the kernel is loaded.
you can issue an i2c command to speed up the processor manually also I believe as the south bridge can control low power states/ control to the processor.

it is part of how the original rgh 1.1 work's by slowing down the processor to make it easier to glitch, it all works different on the slims I'm not to sure but it works in a different way.

it should be well documented on how to change the power states I would believe somewhere.

Dammit!

Yeah it is running at full speed when I'm booting xell with the parameter set for full..
It is likely due to the fact that we don't have a proper cpu driver that the os falsely reports 1GHz all the time when issuing cat /process/cpuinfo.

So is the high CPU usage purely due to software rendering with not much memory to page with?

Skyhi wrote: So is the high CPU usage purely due to software rendering with not much memory to page with?

possibly but remember it is several times more than what is available on the xbox and the resolution is basically the same.

so in theory it should not really have memory problems like the original xbox.

You might find it is limited to one core or something I do remember reading that somewhere.

you might be best to contact swizzy http://www.realmodscene.com/index.php?/ ... 36-swizzy/ on realmodscene he may be able to point you in the right direction.

if you could mash up mplayer and xbmc under libxenon it would free up resources and you have libsdl support from such a low level.

Yeah it really does seem to be a CPU loading issue - memory resources look OK in system settings.

I'd been thinking about checking in with Swizzy- I've used a lot of his good work already.
In fact I'd already registered there but for some reason I'm still unable to post.

The libxenon does look quite interesting and to be able to launch xbmc as an elf file without hardware limitations would be great!

I do seem to remember only one core was enabled or something.

It is roumoured the xbox 360 cpu is basically a triple core ppc and entered the market around the time of the ppc 970 g5 era

try a benchmark program and see what it compairs to it would be intresting but not really helpful as it is highly modified chip it has a hole lot of stuff a consumer chip does not have.

professor_jonny wrote:

GhostlyGamer wrote:Very clever. Might do this on my 360 that im about to R-JTAG+

I found good results with rgh1.2 on the phat consoles also a lot cheaper than r-jtag.

Dashboard is too new for RGH, have to R-JTAG+

Just out of pure curiosity and intrigue...any progress on this project lately?

Been over at realmodscene discussing a few options:

http://www.realmodscene.com/index.php?/ ... -xbox-360/

Very cool, who knows what will come of it but I for one thank you for your time and effort...most people don't realize how easy it is to get sucked up into coding and lose weeks of your life while chasing something down in there

Hats off to the coding, very impressive, my only thoughts is wouldn't you just use Plex? its based on XBMC code and Elan is an ex dev from those days..... I'm not really a fan but it is easier?

GhostlyGamer wrote:

professor_jonny wrote:

GhostlyGamer wrote:Very clever. Might do this on my 360 that im about to R-JTAG+

I found good results with rgh1.2 on the phat consoles also a lot cheaper than r-jtag.

Dashboard is too new for RGH, have to R-JTAG+

no rgh 1.2 will work on the latest dashboard.
rgh2 on a phat is a waste of time in most cases rhg 1.2 works really well.