Technical details - How does it work?

[justinvdk]

Hi,

I'm interested in knowing (roughly) how XBSlink works. It seems to be doing more than just bridging the two sides.

more specifically:

1. I read that the xboxes (or ps2, etc) can just be on the existing lan. Is there anything 'smart' going on such as tunneling only the relevant packets for system link? Or does it open the whole LAN; like a regular bridge? Or does it only route system link traffic
2. Is there anything special going on for the 30ms ping limit for xbox 360 games?

EDIT: After wondering if there were any replies, I realised that I completely butchered some sentences. Fixed that.

[colemickens]

Going through some Xbox nostalgia tonight and I've got a custom Halo booted with custom map packs and doing the rounds to check out what Tunnels are out there. I guess 5 years later maybe you've lost interest but here's what I remember.

I've hacked on a couple versions of my own little xbox tunnel. You sniff the network for UDP packets targeted to 0.0.0.1, anything that trasmits to that is looking for a system link game is an xbox. Add the MAC address to your packet capture.

Xboxes in system link spam packets at each others MAC address, so the application captures the packets from the source network, encapsulates them with information about the original src/dest MAC address and then sends them to the otherside. They're unwrapped and dropped back on the network similar to how they were on the origin network.