New Opportunity Xbox 360 Port

[hetecro]

After almost 3 years of failure on an Xbox 360 port, Microsoft's newest projects, Dreamspark, may open up new possibilities.

The biggest problem before in the port discussion had to do with time, money, and resources. Now, all of that is about to change.

If you go to dreamspark.com, you will notice that Microsoft is giving away free copies of some of it's most expensive development tools and licenses to students. Of these programs are Visual Studio, Visual C#, Visual C++, and XNA Game Creation studio. For anyone who already owns an Xbox 360 and a gold membership, you now have access to a huge community of independent 360 developers as well as console playability.

If anyone with program knowledge happens to be a student, this port may now be possible without having to homebrew. If the port is successful, it can be distributed directly through the 360 marketplace for free, and games can potentially be loaded from flash disk or external hard drive.

[Graxer]

I did think of this before when I first heard of XNA Game creation studio. (And again when I heard of Dreamspark)

The only problem is that Microsoft have to pass the software in their "Community Games" section as suitable. (And have taken games down due to their unsuitability) I'm not sure that they would accept software that can be used to play copyrighted games. (Admittedly ScummVM doesn't support illegal downloads and is not like an emulator where roms are illegal) Also as far as I know there has to be a cost for community games, and ScummVM is free of charge. (I may be wrong about this)

On the other hand, if someone looks into this and decides that it is suitable (after all, companies do sometimes sell their games with ScummVM on the disk to increased compatability. The Broken Sword Trilogy for example), then it would be the best thing available in the Community Games section and I would download it even if we had to pay a few Microsoft Points.

[fingolfin]

The biggest problem before in the port discussion had to do with time, money, and resources.

Absolutely wrong. The biggest problem has been and still is that the conditions Microsoft imposes on anybody who want to use their C/C++ SDK to make apps for the XBox are incompatible with the license we use, the GPL. And that using XNA would require porting the 1,000,000 lines of code of ScummVM to a different language, an enormous task.

The Dreamspark program does not affect either in the slightest, as far as I can tell.

[hetecro]

Yes, well. . .I think a large problem was support. The entire project was being tackled by essentially one person. At the time, XNA was a very closed resource. Many limitations were in place because only private developers could release games.

Fast forward to post December 2008 updates; XNA is now open to freely to anyone who is a student. Limitations have changed because now independent developers are allowed to post their work. This also means that distribution is as easy as signing in to a Premium Xbox Live account.

[Kaminari]

Open source development on the 360 is not an option as long as you won't be able to install Linux on it. Period. Microsoft knows it and Dreamspark can only be a stopgap in the meanwhile.

[fingolfin]

Open source development on the 360 is not an option as long as you won't be able to install Linux on it. Period.

Nonsense. Open source development and software is not limited to Linux. If Microsoft offered their SDK under a license compatible with the GPL, and if they did not restrict access to it, and if they allowed free distribution of homebrew games, there very well could be open source development. Fully without Linux.