Lost Media and Archival/Documentation

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/18554134

A Treasure Trove of Gaming History has been Recovered! Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII and an additional 18 Square Enix i-Mode games, thought lost to history, have resurfaced. This impressive haul includes various Kingdom Hearts titles, and the recovery process involved using a debug cable method devised by the Kahvibreak Discord member XYZ.

Read about the discovery

The incredible efforts of researchers like RockmanCosmo and Twitter user @NaoyaShinota, employing a custom debug cable and Linux scripts, have brought back games such as Final Fantasy 4 After Years, Final Fantasy Legends, and the Kingdom Hearts Card Struggle series.

For enthusiasts, this is an opportunity to revisit these titles on emulators like DoJa SDK. However, some games like Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII still require more work to be made functional.

Have you played any of these Square Enix feature phone games?

Per /u/Harcroft from /r/OriginalXbox:

I’m still plugging away at collecting and distributing original Xbox DLC. Currently we are missing around 300 Title updates and DLC packs.

We’ve made a huge amount of progress this year including:

-building a list of what we know is missing, it can be found over on ConsoleMods.org. (thanks to /u/Derf_Jagged to starting and hosting the page!)

-Milenko has coded Pinecone, a tool to scan through an Xbox file dump to look for lost content and updates

-I’ve built the database file for Pinecone with all known and archived DLC, this information can be access by anyone and be used for any other appliation or tool anyone wants to build

-16 new installers released in 2023 so far, with 2 more pending, waiting on testers

-The first Auto-Update for Halo 2 was found, rewriting known history for Halo 2 online

-The last missing update for Phantasy Star Online: Episode 1 & 2 was found!

-A partial set of Mechassault PAL/Region 4 DLC was found which allowed us to generate a full set of PAL DLC for that title (thanks /u/HoneySoakedSeagull!)

-A partial dump of Advent Rising DLC was found, allowing us to generate a replacement set of the missing 4 DLCs (thanks /u/CasuallyNoted!)

-Ignoring roster updates and duplicate DLCs we got the unique missing DLC list down to just 1 title! Shikigami no Shiro II

-We figured out a way to force the Xbox to load a title update from a different version of a game, paving the way to “spoofed” title updates to maximize compatibility between players on System Link and Xbox Live replacement services (thanks navipar!)

The year isn’t even half up yet and we’ve done so much, I can’t wait to see how much we get done as a community before the end of the year.

Please go out and find Xboxes that had connected to Xbox Live before the hard drives die! For PAL regions we’re badly in need of German and French console dumps. We’re also badly in need of console dumps from Japan and South East Asia.

Thanks for reading!

A series I’ve started where I delve into the history of Square Enix’s PlayOnline service. Next episode I’m gonna be doing some datamining!