nxdk - the new open source xdk

nxdk is a software development kit for the original Xbox. nxdk is a revitalization of OpenXDK.

Notable features:

No complicated cross-compiling or big library dependencies! Builds with make and just needs standard tools and llvm.
3D graphics! nxdk includes and expands on pbkit, a library for interfacing with the Xbox GPU.

Status

nxdk is currently in early stages of development.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

You will need the following tools:

GNU make
clang
GNU bison and flex
lld
Git

OS X

On OS X with Homebrew, this should do the job (XCode ships with make and bison and flex):

brew install llvm --with-lld --with-clang

Linux (Ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install build-essential flex bison clang git

Then install lld from an LLVM nightly package

Windows

Install MSYS2

In a MSYS2 MinGW64 Shell, run:

pacman -S make git bison flex mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-llvm \
mingw-w64-x86_64-clang mingw-w64-x86_64-lld

Using a regular MSYS2 shell will fail later on as the required building system is not supported there.

Download nxdk

git clone https://github.com/xqemu/nxdk.git
cd nxdk
git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive

Build Samples

To build the 0ldskoo1 sample, you can run:

cd samples/0ldskoo1
make

This will generate a single executable, default.xbe, in the bin/ directory which can be executed on your Xbox (or XQEMU emulator).

Generate XISO

To generate an ISO file that can be burned to a disc, or passed to the XQEMU emulator via the -drive index=1,media=cdrom,file=/path/to/your.iso parameter, define the GEN_XISO variable with the name of the ISO to be created in your project Makefile. For example:

GEN_XISO=$(XBE_TITLE).iso

You can include additional files in the ISO (they must reside in the output directory) like this:

...
ISO_DEPS = $(OUTPUT_DIR)/example.txt
GEN_XISO = $(XBE_TITLE).iso

include $(NXDK_DIR)/Makefile

$(GEN_XISO): $(ISO_DEPS)
$(OUTPUT_DIR)/example.txt:
    echo "Hello" > $@

clean: clean_iso_deps
.PHONY: clean_iso_deps
clean_iso_deps:
    rm -f $(ISO_DEPS)

For easy ISO generation, you can also just define it when you run make:

make -C samples/0ldskoo1 GEN_XISO=0ldskoo1.iso

Next Steps

Copy one of the sample directories to get started. You can copy it anywhere you like, but make sure that the NXDK_DIR variable in the Makefile points to correct place. Then, in the directory, you can simply run make.

Credits

OpenXDK is the inspiration for nxdk, and large parts of it have been reused. (License: GPLv2)
Large parts of pbkit, by openxdkman, are included, with modifications. (License: LGPL)
A very barebones libc is included based on lib43 (License: MIT)
vp20compiler is based on nvvertparse.c from Mesa (License: MIT)
fp20compiler is based on nvparse from the NVIDIA SDK 9.52.
The NVIDIA Cg compiler is bundled.
extract-xiso developed by in et al. (License: BSD)

Code Overview

lib/hal/ - Barebones Hardware Abstraction Layer for the Xbox, from OpenXDK.
lib/pbkit/ - A low level library for interfacing with the Xbox GPU.
lib/usb/ - USB support from OpenXDK. Hacked together parts of an old Linux OHCI stack.
lib/xboxkrnl - Stubs and import library for the interfacing with the Xbox kernel.
lib/xboxrt - A very simple libc implementation.
tools/cxbe - Simple converter for PE executables to the Xbox executable format, from OpenXDK.
tools/fp20compiler - Translates register combiner descriptions to Xbox pushbuffer commands.
tools/vp20compiler - Translates vertex program assembly to Xbox microcode.
tools/extract-xiso - Generates and extracts ISO images compatible with the Xbox (and XQEMU).
samples/ - Sample applications to get started.

brandontraister/nxdk