I’m gonna take a dump when I get home

of each disc in another pile of Xbox 360 games

@maddy for fuss-free multitasking, you can start one type of dump running while you go and do the other ;)

@seabass Heheheh

I’ll probably be multitasking anyway - playing Skyrim while I monitor progress on my laptop :p

@maddy I've got to try this Skyrim thing, haven't I? But it looks a bit scary 😬

[picks up “Dante’s Inferno” from the stack]

"Hey babe, look - it's off-brand God of War!"

Disclaimer: This is not a criticism of the game’s quality. I haven’t played through it (yet), but I’ve heard very good things.

Though it was definitely trying to ride on the success of the God of War franchise, apparently hastily developed before the release of God of War III.

97 titles successfully dumped and on my server. Between the random filler and encrypted game data, Xbox 360 discs really don’t compress that well. With compression enabled for this ZFS dataset, what would otherwise be taking up 838GB is only taking up 734GB.

Had a few titles that wouldn’t dump so far - Prototype and Ridge Racer 6. Not too bad considering a fair number of these were picked up second-hand!

@maddy I think you mean compression, encryption doesn't make things take less space

@koopa512 Yeah, thank you, that was a brain fart.

Disc rot on my copy of Left 4 Dead

Trying to dump it anyway, but I don’t have high hopes.

@maddy silly fof

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!! It made it past layer 0 without any reported errors.
I might still be able to get a full dump of the disc!!

@maddy

What are you using to copy it?

I had amazing results from #ddrescue when the disk in a hard drive recorder started to die. It was very slow, but worked better than I had any right to expect.

Uhhhh, it fully dumped without read errors and matches the entry on Redump.

Maybe DVDs are more hardy than I thought. There was a dark spot clearly in the data area of the disc, rather than on the outer rim. No idea how it successfully read that area through both layers, but I’m not complaining.

@maddy L4D came out on *disc*? this is a revelation

@_aD Yeah, you could get it on disc for PC and Xbox 360! The PC retail copy was essentially an install disc and Steam key.

@maddy

Ooh, good luck!

I didn't realise Xbox discs used a weird proprietary format. It's Microsoft, though, so I should've guessed!

Took a quick break to get my kitten a slurpee (and some other caffeinated beverages for later), and now we’re back home. Back to dumping!

I’m on my last pile of Xbox 360 games, and I’m realizing that I’m missing a concerning number of titles that I don’t remember getting rid of, both for Xbox/360 and PlayStation.

Like, I don’t ever play shooters anymore, and I’m pretty sure I had a duplicate copy of Call of Duty World at War, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember getting rid of both copies, considering it was significant in that it was the first CoD with the Zombies game mode.

I’ve tried my best not to sell off or get rid of games I’ve owned since I’ve been living on my own, so I’m uhhhh… at a loss

@seabass I highly recommend it if you’re into adventure RPGs! ^.^

@maddy

Good grief! What a waste of human ingenuity!

@maddy World be nice, if it does work. :D

Backed up all the 360 games I could find. 111 titles, totaling ~952GB before compression.
Gonna have to do some digging for those other titles at some point. Worst case, I can re-buy them.
Xbox games generally don’t go for a while lot unless they’ve had fewer copies produced, or were involved in an exploit, and then they magically shoot up in value despite there being so many copies out in the wild. Scalpers can eat shit.

Seriously though, there’s no reason for a used copy of Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland to cost anymore than $12 CAD, but take a look at how much they’re going for on eBay.

@maddy how much after compression?

@bearmine ~833GB

@maddy not bad not great

@maddy That's the game where you can use an exploit to softmod yeah?

Like how 007 Agent under Fire went through the roof when freemcboot first came out.

@fwaggle Yeah, and it’s now the least efficient way to do the software exploit on 360 these days. I’m pretty sure the latest iteration exploits the built-in avatar editor, and it’s nearly instant. With THAW, it was like a 20% chance after running for like 30 minutes. The prices haven’t come back down.

Yeah, I remember there were a few games that you could use to softmod the original Xbox - Splinter Cell, 007 Agent Under Fire, and MechAssault. Some games had revisions where the exploit wouldn’t work anymore, so you had to look out for black label vs platinum hits for some. I was lucky enough to get all three between my local pawn shop and eBay for like $10 a pop back then.

@maddy @fwaggle I didn't know there was a software exploit to run unsigned code on the Xbox 360. Does that mean it's possible to run Linux on it without hardware mods?

@noisytoot @fwaggle Yeah, the exploit is called “Bad Update” or “Bad avatar” these days. I haven’t been keeping up ‘cause I’ve been happy with my RGH consoles.
I don’t think you can run Linux on it since it happens so long after boot, but again, I haven’t kept totally up to date on the situation.

@maddy @fwaggle According to https://free60.org/Hacks/Bad_Update_Hack/ it is possible. I have an Xbox 360 (that I haven't used in years), I should try it

@noisytoot @fwaggle Oh heck, that’s really cool!

Oh poo, I gotta re-dump my GC/Wii discs ‘cause the version of redumper I was using at the time didn’t save the BCA (Burst Cutting Area).

At least I only have ~20 titles between those two consoles. Used to have a lot more before I sold off my Wii and some games when I was younger.

@maddy cat who wants those gc/wii games for a reasonable price once you’re done with them

@maddy waf

What I really need to do is get off my lazy bum, figure out how many tapes I need to offload a bunch of stuff taking up space on my server, and get the ol’ tape library running again.

I’ve just been upping the quota on the dataset every time it gets close to full.

@maddy have you needed to use any settings like leave-unchanged for this? I have a bunch of Xbox360/PS1/2/3 discs I need to dump, and I’m curious what your workflow is

@crowbriarhexe I basically use the default settings in MPF (Media Preservation Frontend), preferring redumper as the program. Only thing I really change is turning up the retries to 150, enabling verbose logs, and logging into my redump account so dumps can be checked and matched again what’s already in their database.

In case you’re unaware, Xbox/360 discs will require specific hardware and firmware to dump since MS made it practically impossible for just any consumer DVD drive to read them.

On a similar note, CDs are a rabbit hole and a half, and redump recommends specific drives for dumping them properly - this would apply to PS1 and PS2 CDs.

If you’d like more details, let me know and I can infodump a bit. I don’t mean to reply-guy! 💜

@maddy Don’t be silly, you’re a lovely helpful person and I’m here for any and all info-dumping 💜 Yeah, I wondered about the drive requirements because game discs have always been notorious for non-standard tricks to resist copying. I have an LG Blu-Ray drive, BD-RE WH16NS60 with microcode re-enabled and LibreDrive’d firmware (MT1959) that I got and updated specifically for Blu-Ray backups with MakeMKV that can do raw data and metadata reads, is that enough? And are the redumper results compatible with emulators? If you can DM me even just links to info I’d be really grateful, sorry to be a bother 💜

Didn’t touch the tape library. Re-dumped my GameCube games, which went way faster than it did with the 1.0.0 OmniDrive firmware. Redumper also seems to have better error correction than the last time I ran it, so I might give my troublesome discs (Metroid Prime and WindWaker) another try.

Do I do the Wii games tonight?
…Nah, I’m eepy