The previous generation shared information, but this was difficult as popular mainline revision services like GitHub, Bitbucket and Gitlab simply did not exist yet. This era of modding entered the world of hiding knowledge behind walls. This takes us to my 2nd generation of Halo modding with the Xbox 360. This would make research eons better as well as growing to the continued expanse of tools (Xbox Media Center, Xored Trainer Launcher and Xecuter Mod Chips)ĭoing anything for 6+ years takes a toll though and the leadership around Halomods retired as the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 was about to be released. Those old enough to really understand the technical complexity of things could even leverage debug dashboards and certain version of Visual Studio (I think 2003) to attach a debugger to the Xbox itself. Competing sites launched and the scene erupted with chats strewn across IRC, AIM and MSN. Tools were built for controlling the water on levels while many other tools were full blown map editors. Halomods was the home to hundreds of utilities and thousands of thousands of discussions for modifying the game. I'm under the belief that an easy to mod console with a cheap barrier to entry led to the explosion that was Xbox modding, specifically Halo 2. If you are interested in how this actually worked, XboxDev Wiki has tons of details for the process, which was basically finding vulnerabilities (in this case a buffer overflow)

This was huge - anyone could ' softmod' their box by simply buying two relatively cheap things. This was as easy as buying Splinter Cell and getting some sort of device for modifying saved games on a memory unit. My intro to modding began with Halo 2 on the original Xbox. So this post is about three generations of modding - the community, the tools and the changes from my memory.

Games with halo mods