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OG Xbox Forums => Software Forums => Xbox Homebrew Software => Topic started by: h8raid on December 04, 2004, 02:43:00 AM

Title: Steaming Games Is Possible
Post by: h8raid on December 04, 2004, 02:43:00 AM
Alright, I believe it is definately possible to stream games over a network and play them on your Xbox.  Basically we could use XBMC's ability to hookup to a SMB shared drive.  We need a utility that will make the D partition (DVD drive) act as a virtual drive.  Now what we would want to happen is this you would go into My Files and go into SMB and select your .iso game, press the white button, and select our new option, mount to D:\  At this point the D partition would be changed over to a virtual drive, the image would transfer over in it's entirety to a temporary directory on a configurable partition (E:\, F:\, or G:\) then mounted up to the virtual drive on D:\ which is actually our DVD drive.  Now it is as if there is actually a DVD in the drive, and we don't have an issue with the fact that the Xbox is not able to multitask because the image has already been transferred over in its entirety so we do not need to maintain an FTP connection to our SMB share to access the file.  Also, no further patching is needed because as you remember, we have mounted the image from our temporary directory on the Xbox to D:\ so it is essentially the same thing as having an actual DVD in the drive.

This is of course not the most ideal way to do things and really is no different then transferring a game to the box through FTP and playing it off the hard drive, so really, mounting the image is not necessary, it is merely to demonstrate that it is possible, and to get things rolling a little bit as this has been considered "impossible".
Title: Steaming Games Is Possible
Post by: SigTom on December 04, 2004, 07:28:00 AM
Are you working on this or are you just speculating?
Title: Steaming Games Is Possible
Post by: Jezz_X on December 04, 2004, 10:56:00 AM
Its not streaming at all all you are doing is copying the whole image over before running I'm pretty sure someone allready has a python script that dows this for XBMC
Title: Steaming Games Is Possible
Post by: Drilus on December 04, 2004, 04:55:00 PM
eh, yeah that has nothing to do with streaming. furthermore, copying the iso and mounting the drive would take a bit.  i can't see this as a practical way to play games.
Title: Steaming Games Is Possible
Post by: h8raid on December 04, 2004, 07:53:00 PM
Right, this is speculation.  Also, I stated that this is not really streaming, it is in fact just copying it.  The thing is it is a way to get games from the network and it is a starting point.  This can already be achieved very easily using XBMC, I know.  My main goal of posting was to get people thinking.  If we can mount up an image to D:\ (DVD drive) over the network, then it would be entirely possible to play games over the network.  Once this is working, then better ways to do things can be achieved later.  This would really just be useful to people who are only using stock drives since you can generally only fit at most two games on a stock drive.  They would be able to use this feature to store games on a remote machine since most computers these days come equipped with decent sized drives.

My understanding about why actually streaming games over the network is because the Xbox cannot multitask, but the part I am not completely sure of is why exactly can we not do this.  I mean you can hookup to Xlink or Live once the game is loaded, why can't we maintain a connection?  I am assuming it is because once the .xbe of the game is loaded that it would kill the connection since it cannot multitask so it can only handle one .xbe at a time?

With the X3 1959 bios, you can configure the server settings that Live! will connect to, I think this might work for streaming games.  What I am thinking is it could be setup like this, obviously simply mounting an image to D:\ would defeat the purpose of streaming games for those of us with upgraded hard drives because we would still have to wait for the entire game to transfer so it could be mounted to D:\ over the network.  So my theory is that we can mount up say the first 5% of the game so it will load up to the starting screen and allow you to use the Live! tab.  From here you would have your X3 bios configured so the Live! tab would connect to your own games server and begin streaming, that way multitasking is not an issue and rather than actually playing on live, the game would go ahead and load and play as normal.

If this is possible, you would obviously need some software on your games server so that the game would actually just stream over the network and play as normal.  You may also need to create a patch for the .xbe that would basically effect the way Live! works so that everything would work properly.  Remember this is all theory, I just want to get some other oppinions on it to see if it is even possible.  That being said, what do you guys think?  It would take a lot of work to get things up and running, but would definately be an awesome feature and a pretty sweet little breakthrough if everything were to work.  So, do you think this might be possible?  Or are there any other ideas anybody has to get this working?  What problems do you see with the ideas presented here?
Title: Steaming Games Is Possible
Post by: Jezz_X on December 04, 2004, 10:13:00 PM
QUOTE
Right, this is speculation. Also, I stated that this is not really streaming, it is in fact just copying it.


well if you wern't talking about streaming then why make you post title

Steaming Games Is Possible, This is how!

look its is possible but it is somthing that has to be built into the bios and then the transfer speeds that you would get between your PC and you Xbox would make the game stop and start all the time.
I know you mention about caching 5% of it but what part to you catch unless you know how every game works and what files / parts of files it loads next you cant

EDIT hehe I just noticed it says steaming not streaming so you could say you weren't talking about it I recomend over a nice hot oven to steam a game really well they taste so good  :D

This post has been edited by Jezz_X: Dec 5 2004, 06:20 AM