In 2001, four days before the launch of the original Xbox in North America, on the 11th of November, an illegal dump of Halo was uploaded to the Internet by a group, or individual, known as "DDD". Soon, after the launch in North America in early 2002, a group, known as "ProjectX", released around 60 original Xbox titles in the space of around three days. So, who is ProjectX and how did they release Xbox titles so quickly? And how did DDD leak out a copy of Halo even before the launch of the original Xbox? To understand this better, we need to discuss release groups and how they operate. Since the earliest days of video games, there has been groups of individuals whose goal is to acquire, dump, crack and release a game on BBS's, or Bulletin Boards (these days - on the Internet). These groups were made up of people all with specific roles. The suppliers would acquire a copy of the game. Some suppliers would just buy the game from a retail store as soon as it opened up. Good suppliers, however, were insiders who worked at game stores, or in game studios, or had contacts at game studios, and were able to supply a copy of the game before the street date. The supplier would then provide the game to the crackers who would work on cracking the copy protection of the game. The testers would then ensure that the copy protection worked and the game would run. The couriers were then used to spread the release as far and wide as they could. Groups also had coders, developers who worked on tools and utilities to help the group release their games faster. Release groups like this had competition. And it was a race to get your release out faster than the other group. Why? Well, mainly, for street cred and respect. If your team had the better suppliers, coders, then the end-users, i.e. the downloaders, knew who your group was and then use it. They were getting a quality release. ProjectX was one of just many release groups for the original Xbox. But they were the first with a massive dump of over 60 titles in three days. And they meant business. It wasn't long before other release groups got involved, such as Riot, Complex, Epsilon and others. This was a race, like every other scene to get your release out faster than the competition. Now, I know what you're thinking. Ripping games like this isn't hard. With the modded Xbox, you can simply put the disc in the drive tray, open up your modded dashboard like UnleashX or Avalanche, connect to it via FTP, and the contents of the disc is right there for the taking, to transfer over to your PC. The thing is: this isn't how groups ripped discs at all. There was another method: with a cheap DVD drive and a PC, years before the popular drive to rip Xbox discs known as "Kreon drives" even existed. Now, because release groups were racing each other to get their releases out faster than the competition. The use of an original Xbox to rip games and upload them was just not an option. It was just much too slow. As we will see shortly, there are much easier and faster methods to get your game ripped and released out into the Internet. But before we do that, let's take a look at the Xbox game disc itself. As with almost all optical disc-based console hardware, the original Xbox DVD was protected from duplication. On first glance, the disc appears to be a normal DVD that's readable by a regular PC DVD drive. When you insert an Xbox game disc into a PC, however, a video plays. When we try to read the contents of the disc, only the video files are displayed. The actual game content is nowhere to be found. So what's going on here? Quite simply, each Xbox Game Disc, or XGD, has two partitions on the disc. The first is readable only on a PC. The second is locked away and hidden, which is enabled when you insert the disc into an original Xbox console. To explain this further, when you insert an Xbox DVD into a PC, once the lead-in is read, the disc becomes user-accessible. PC DVD drives use Logical Block Addressing, or LBAs, to specify where data lives on the drive. After the disc lead-in, the video partition begins at LBA 0x000000, all the way up to LBA 0x30600. Then, the game partition area begins at that position, all the way to the lead out of the disc. But the table of contents that contains the information about the total number of sectors on the disc only returns information about the first partition, or the video partition. On an original Xbox, things are different. On a standard Xbox drive, it doesn't use LBAs at all. Rather, it uses Physical Sector Numbers, or PSNs, from 0x000000, all the way up to the end of the disc. When you insert an Xbox game disc into an original Xbox, after a challenge-response authentication check, once authentication has succeeded, the drive changes its PSN offset for its mapping to the game partition and bypasses the video partition. So, because, well, these groups were racing each other to get their releases out faster. There were many tools and utilities that were developed by certain members of these particular teams. And one of them, in particular, is the Xbox DVD Ripper that runs on a PC. Now, the [a?] release groups quickly understood that the best and fastest way to get their rips out faster than the competition is to completely bypass an Xbox in the first place. In other words, just use a PC to rip your game discs and upload them. And that's exactly what they did: with a particular DVD drive, known as the "Hitachi GD-5000", and a slightly customized firmware. The DVD drive is completely unlocked and allows the ability to rip Xbox Original discs and Xbox 360 game discs as well. The Hitachi GD-5000 is a very cheap 8x DVD drive that runs on a standard IDE bus. It was cheap back when it first came out, and it's still cheap and easy to pick up to this day. I'm not sure why release groups settled on this drive as the one to use and I'll explain that shortly. But needless to say: "This was the drive that all of the groups used." If you wanted to rip original Xbox discs fast, this is what you needed to get the job done. The GD-5000 was also a very popular drive on Dell and Gateway machines. My old Windows 98 machine, for example, the Dimension XPS D266, comes standard with the same drive. Getting the GD-5000 to read Xbox discs is simple: you'll need to install a modified firmware onto the drive one time. Once this is done, all you need to do is insert a game disc. Now you will note: when you insert a game disc on Windows Explorer, it will still show the video partition only. But this is where the "xbdvdread" program comes into it. If you insert any Xbox game disc and I'll use Fable, for this example, and you run the command line "xbdvdreprogram", it performs sector-based ripping of the disc and, after a while, the entire contents is dripped onto your hard disk, ready to package up and upload for those mad Internet reputation points. Now, if we compare ripping Fable on the original Xbox and then FTP it over to the PC, it takes more than three times the amount of time. In the worst case, a disc with many many files and many many directories really slows down during the FTP process, so you can quickly see how this drive became the secret weapon of most reputable sin groups back in the day. This is how ProjectX released 60 of their games in three days and why the Xbox scene became very lucrative for sin groups. So, how does this XB DVD Ripper program work? Well, it's very simple. The Hitachi drive, like all DVD drives, has on-board RAM. And that's where information about the currently inserted disc would live. This RAM is not normally writable. But the Hitachi drive has a hidden command to enable this RAM to be written to. The Xbox Ripper code enables this RAM and patches the offsets of the LBA to be at the beginning of the game partition and read sectors from that, all the way up to the end of the partition, including the DVD layer break. And that's it. It's very very simple. This method probably worked on many other DVD drives that have the same hidden command to access the DVD drive's RAM. As early as 2001, this drive was one of the biggest kept secrets in the original Xbox underground scene and was a staple of all release groups at the time. It wasn't until around 2006, until Kreon drive started to appear. The GD-5000 also allows for the ripping of Xbox 360 game discs with a slight modification to the DVD layer break offset which is in a different position than the original Xbox. But by the release of the Xbox 360, there was a much more refined method of ripping game discs. I do want to mention that I am releasing the utilities and the firmware that you saw in this video that I ran on the Windows PC out into the wild. So, download it, take a look at it. Unfortunately, there's no source code available for it. But if anyone knows about this hack, it was part of any release groups back in the day that's familiar with this. I'm sure there's some folks out there that watch this video and you have access to source code. I'd be very interested, even just for preservation sake having that source code would be really cool to have available. And, hopefully, it can help other DVD drives get unlocked that don't necessarily require the Kreon firmware to run. You know, this is something that potentially could unlock on many other DVD drives out there. It doesn't necessarily need a Kreon firmware to do so, as you've seen. So, hopefully, you know, someone will come forward and let us know if there is source code available. I would be very interested in taking a look at that. But, I will leave a link to the firmware and the executable in the comments below. So, take a look at it, enjoy it. If you have a GD-5000 drive, mess around with it and you will see that it's very very simple and trivial to rip both Xbox Original game discs and Xbox 360 game discs as well. Well, guys, I hope you enjoyed this video, you know what to do: if you like this video, please give me a thumbs up and let me know what you thought about it in the comments below. As always, don't forget to Like and subscribe, and I'll catch you, guys, in the next video. Bye for now. [Outro song - Pacific Drive]
