Xbox: Participate in Game Preservation with XCAT

In recent years, there has been a large shift in the community to try and focus on data preservation and game preservation in particular. For most people, this equates to finding a long-lost prototype game cartridge in your grandma’s attic and getting it dumped. However, there is a lot of non-physical media that has been lost due to online services being shut down or delisting content. This is where XCAT comes into play.

What is Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT)?

XCAT is the brainchild of developer CrunchBite and the leading preservationist in the Xbox scene — Harcroft. For over 16 years, Harcroft has been cataloging and hunting for DLC, long before the shutdown of Xbox Live for the original Xbox turned off the faucet of new downloads. It’s due to their expertise that a database of all found and unfound content has been organized and a tool for anyone to participate in preservation was made.

Simply put, XCAT is a piece of software that you can run on your Xbox, whether it’s modified or not, that will scan for new unseen content and will upload it to be processed. This allows for not only official DLC and updates to be found and preserved, but also for community-made files, such as game mods or skins, to be found and saved.

You may be wondering how it can be run on an unmodified system. Due to the recent release of the ENDGAME exploit, a package for XCAT was able to be made that will run the exploit and launch XCAT directly, without having to install anything to your system.

Findings so far

Since the launch of XCAT, the community has found at least 37 missing pieces of content:

13 game updates:

• Battlefield 2 Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
• Fifa 07 Soccer
• Juiced (sole update)
• Links 2004
• Midnight Club 3
• MotoGP2
• NFL 2K3
• NFL Fever 2003
• Project Gotham Racing 2
• Splinter Cell CT
• Tetris Worlds
• TopSpin
• Xbox Music Mixer – PAL (previously unknown!)

18 DLCs:

• MLB 2K5 (6 of 6 missing DLC)
• NBA inside Drive (4 of 6 missing DLC)
• NBA Jam (2 of 2 missing DLC)
• Karaoke Revolution (4 of 4 missing DLC)
• Karaoke Revolution Party (3 of 20 missing DLC)

5 game updates (during XCAT beta):

• Halo 2 (French, critical and EXCEPTIONALLY hard to find)
• Halo 2 (Beta)
• MechAssault
• RTC Wolfenstein (French, critical and EXCEPTIONALLY hard to find)
• Star Wars Battlefront (French, critical and EXCEPTIONALLY hard to find)

What’s left?

See this page on ConsoleMods.org for a list of all the known missing DLCs, or the full status list here. Beyond this, there may be other DLC that is unknown, such as the found Xbox Music Mixer PAL update.

How can I help?

Visit the XCAT page on ConsoleMods.org for instructions on how to run XCAT. A demonstration of XCAT can be found in the video below.

XCAT can be downloaded from this Digiex thread.

Conclusion

If you have an original Xbox, give XCAT a run. It will tell you if any new files were found and will only upload those files. It’s rare that game preservation methods are this easy and available for anyone to help out. You never know, you might find something new!