Interview: 15 years after the servers shut down, FromSoft's singular mech game Chromehounds is back online
The PvP mech battler is finally playable online in Xbox 360 emulator Xenia, and I talked to the modder making it happen.
[Chromehounds lobby]
Me: [chanting] mechs, mechs-
Other pilots: Mechs, MECHS
Mechanic: [pounding her toolbox] MECHS, MECHS, MECHS!
Hello! Apologies for the late issue, but this story came together last minute, on account of capital-L Life, and also because the subject is developing fast. Hopefully it's worth the wait! I've got an exclusive interview for you on a shit-hot community project to resurrect a FromSoftware game that was criminally underappreciated in its day. I mean, that's practically all FromSoftware games, but this one was just born in the wrong time and place — I think it would be a substantial hit on Steam in the year 2025.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, while also being behind. So let's jump right into it! It's big stompy robot time.
The Big One
1. Bringing back the FromSoftware mech game that was a decade ahead of its time
On Wednesday, Resetera member wwm0nkey posted a thread I've been waiting to see for years: "Fans are working to bring From Software's ChromeHounds back online." But the news is actually even better than that: they've already succeeded. For the first time since Sega shut down the servers in 2010, FromSoftware's most inspired mech game is playable again, with a small group of diehard fans currently battling it out in up to 6v6 multiplayer matches.
The tl;dr on Chromehounds: it's a team-based, PvP mech game with customizable machines and unique asymmetrical roles that demanded true collaboration to succeed. Heavy mechs too slow to maneuver around the battlefield had to sit on the backlines, firing off artillery shots at the direction of the frontline troops. Commanders held squads together, dishing out information and orders. Capturing communication towers was the only way to keep comms open, and their limited range meant pushing into enemy territory likely meant intense, high risk radio silence. Battles fed into a meta-level conflict between warring nations, with enough wins for one side eventually resulting in conquest of a capital city and a reset of the whole war. This video from YouTube channel Save Data breaks it all down in more detail, and what made it so unique at the time — which honestly still applies today.
Chromehounds was, of course, never big, but the players who loved it really loved it. What I found most fascinating about it (from a distance, because it never made it off my "I should try that sometime" list in the Xbox 360 era) was how battles hinged on the implementation of voice chat, which was still novel and exciting on consoles then. Everyone was guaranteed to have that dinky 360 headset, but few games treated communication as a malleable mechanic. Empowering certain players to distribute information and drawing stark boundaries between where you could and couldn't reach your team flooded the tactical playspace with so many possibilities even before you got to customizing mechs or outshooting your enemies.
There was a beautiful but brief window after the launch of the Xbox 360 in late 2005 when developers were experimenting with these sorts of voice chat ideas, and of course FromSoftware would come up with a fascinating (and underappreciated) game built around it. Two years after Chromehounds came out, Microsoft effectively made games like it extinct by releasing Party Chat, which allowed everyone to skip out on public chat and talk only with their friends.
While the situation is much the same now, with most of us sequestered in private Discords whenever we play, I think the success of games like Phasmophobia and Lethal Company — and the audience for games on PC now being bigger and more varied than ever — shows that people will hop in public voice for a compelling enough idea. Likewise, the diehards who truly love Chromehounds will, to this day, jump through the hackiest set of hoops imaginable for a chance to experience its magic once again.
"I'm glad people trusted me, because I don't know if I would've quite trusted me up to that point. 'Hey, this 15-year-old game is running; all you have to do is run this EXE that Windows says is bad," jokes ImagineBeingAtComputers, the modder behind Chromehounds' comeback.
ImagineBeingAtComputers set up a Discord server called OpenCOMBAS in 2023 after setting out to try to revive the game and eventually finding a developer debug build. "What this gets us isn't quite clear yet, but it definitely gets us closer," he wrote in the server's announcement channel. Then a year went by. The debug build of the game granted him access to lots of useful information about how Chromehounds worked, but it wasn't the silver bullet it may sound like. In May 2024 he posted in the Discord that he was at an impassable dead end, with no idea how to revive the game's online multiplayer.
In just the last few days, everything's changed. And it's changed so fast that the announcement channel hasn't even yet been updated with the good news. But OpenCOMBAS members trusting enough to download ch_server.exe have found themselves in live matches they didn't dare dream about playing ever again.
"It was really emotional," says IBAC. "It really wasn't something I was mentally prepared for. I started working on this again ... about a month ago, and set a mental roadmap given the current state of [Xbox 360 emulator] Xenia that it was going to be about 5-6 months of work to get things up and running. To have it all happen all at once when I wasn't really ready ... we were in one of the voice channels and suddenly I look and there's like 50 people in the call talking about their own experiences, the Facebook group was talking about it, there were people recording it ... it's been moving at a breakneck place, and it's been really cool to hear so many people turning the clock back 15 years and playing with their friends."
Okay, so what the heck happened? How, out of seemingly thin air, did Chromehounds come back from the dead?
There are two main forces at work here. One is Xenia Canary Netplay, an online-multiplayer fork of the experimental build of the Xbox 360 emulator. It's under constant development, primarily from programmer Adrian Cassar, with more than 400 games listed as netplay-compatible for LAN or emulated Xbox Live multiplayer. The emulator's progress opened the door for IBAC to finally crack the basics of how Chromehounds' online multiplayer worked and recreate a rudimentary server to play online.
With a background in infrastructure and security, ImagineBeingAtComputers had a bit of experience with reverse-engineering before this project — though he's preemptively apologizing about the quality of the C++ code he's written for the OpenCOMBAS project (not his speciality), which will soon be open source.
Even though Xenia's accuracy makes it an ideal emulator for figuring out how games tick, Chromehounds wasn't an easy target.
"Chromehounds was written for the original Xbox, and a lot of its Live functionality, from my understanding, is kind of a legacy compatibility style of Live. There's a lot of stuff that was not used by subsequent Xbox 360 titles. ... Luckily the prototype build had a lot of debug logging that made it a lot easier to understand what it was doing. When things would fail it would make a log and tell you what it was trying to do. Through those log lines we found out that this game was very different than what had been implemented within the netplay project at that point."
IBAC's initial goal wasn't to recreate Chromehounds' title servers, which governed the ongoing "Neroimus War" that I alluded to earlier. He had a humbler mission in mind. Remember how the war would occassionally reset when one nation won the conflict? During that time, the servers would actually shut down for a short period (much like the downtime between Fortnite seasons today) during which players could only partake in online "free battles" that didn't play into any grander stakes or affect their rank. He figured if he could trick the game into thinking its servers were down for maintenance, players could at least enter into free battles and mess around.
He spent nearly a year trying to figure out how Chromehounds spoke to its servers and got nowhere. After ages staring at lines of code in reverse-engineering tool Ghidra, he decided to take a long break. But recent progress on Xenia Netplay convinced him to take another look, and suddenly all the pieces started falling into place.
Another member of the community managed to acquire Chromehounds' "regulation file," which the game always wanted to grab from the server upon connecting; it contained basic but important data around game balance and so on that they needed to spoof a server. IBAC got in touch with Cassar, who was able to figure out and implement the way Chromehounds communicated with Xbox Live, and with those two pieces in place they reach an exciting milestone: getting emulated Chromehounds to try to talk to it servers.
Using the debug build, they could then see that the data packets Chromehounds was sending and expecting to receive back were quite simple — basically just the user's Xbox Live ID, the port it anticipated the server connecting on, and a little bit of supplementary data.
"The log was something along the lines of 'welcome to the Chromehounds server (string of data), server local time (string of data), server maintenance begins (strong of data), server maintenance ends (strong of data," he says. "I was like, okay, we just need to tell the server that maintenance began an hour ago and ends 100 years from now." With that bit of info spoofed along with the version number the game was looking for, suddenly they were online. That was five days ago.
"Figuring that out happened in such a short period of time it felt unreal. There was almost no midpoint; everything just became a bit of a dream. We hadn't made any progress beyond understanind the game more up until that point, and now we're seeing menus that hadn't been seen for 15 years."
At 6:22 pm central time on Wednesday, ImagineBeingAtComputers and wwm0nkey, who'd been avidly following the project, tested it out and successfully played a 1v1 match. Since then word's spread and old Chromeheads have come flooding into the server eager to relive the glory days.
This was my favorite exchange as I hung out in the channel on Friday:
"I haven't seen that name in 15 years. How you been man."
"I'm old as hell now, how about you?"
IBAC and a few other contributors have already solved some minor hurdles to make it easier for multiple matches to be running at once, but the project very much remains in its "duct taped together" phase: downloading a smattering of files, configuring a VPN and IP addresses, and so on. You can experience it right now if you want to join the OpenCOMBAS Discord, but this is just the very beginning of Chromehounds' revival.
"Right now the roadmap is to get the Neroimus War server running again in some capacity," IBAC says. "That manages statistics, faction population, war status, things like that. A major component of this is going to be presenting enough data about the state of the war to convince the clients that they can login and play a match. We have to get it to hte point where it accepts the war is up, and then actually be able to take the data that the clients are passing it and populate a big database. Which will be stuff like 'this ID is in this faction, in this squad, and has these statistics.' And then additionally store data as war sorties, so it'll be able to say 'this faction won this sortie at this location and it's now owned by this faction.' It'll be a complicated relational database we need to rebuild."
The immediate focus, though, is just getting free battles as stable as possible, so players can hop in without any fiddly issues and play PvP with the full unlocked arsenal of Chromehounds parts. They hope to start digging into the work involved in setting up a proper war server in a few weeks.
While discussing all of this remarkable progress I still had one lingering question: what about the wholly unique range-based voice chat that was key to Chromehounds' desisgn? "A real stretch goal is to look into getting voice supported by netplay," ImagineBeingAtComputers says. Currently Xbox Live's voice chat system isn't built into Xenia at all.
That could change as developer Adrian Cassar plows ahead with his own work. Or it could be something that the OpenCOMBAS team — which is already growing as some diehard mech jockeys become volunteers — takes on in the future after the war server is up and running. It's clear IBAC and other players are passionate about bringing Chromehounds back in its full glory. But one step at a time.
"Friday night we had a 12-person lobby going and it really did just feel like suddenly we were all back in 2009, playing a game that hasn't been seen, in this capacity, for 15 years," ImagineBeingAtComputers says. "It's really been a bit of a dream come true. I got laid off, too — literally on Tuesday. Part of me was like 'hey, at least I didn't have to put in my resignation so that I could play Chromehounds 24/7 from this point on."
That might sound like putting on a brave face, but IBAC says he's grateful to have some free time, and doesn't immediately have to go on the job hunt. "Right now I'm just happy to be able to dedicated almost 100% to getting things off the ground here."
Patching In
Try Dolphin's new unlocked frame rates for yourself – It's here! As mentioned a couple issues back, some contributors to Dolphin have been experimenting with high fps support in games that run without a locked framerate. While this is a relatively small portion of games, it's enticing enough that the feature has now been incorporated into the latest Dolphin dev builds, so you can try it out for yourself if you update your installation. Give it a try in Mario Strikers or Speed Racer for the Wii, two of the best showcases for 120 fps in the emulator.
ShadPS4 v.9.0 keeps up the pace – This crew just doesn't stop. ShadPS4 continues to make amazing process, with a new numbered release landing in each of the last three months. The list of improvements like "sceKernelAllocateDirectMemory hotfixes" probably won't mean much to you if you aren't Mark Cerny, but compatibility is inching its way forward with more games than just Bloodborne.
Fixing bugs in PCSX2's RT in RT – Just highlighting this bit of work to improve compatibility in PCSX2 for The Getaway and Valkyrie Profile 2 because it's related to a feature that I interviewed PCSX2 dev Refraction about back in February. He's still making it better!
Cemu is Kamen Rider compatible – The Wii U emulator now supports a USB peripheral for Kamen Rider: Summon Ride, which is apparently a Skylanders-like? Who knew this was a thing? We better get word to the kids in Japan! (And by kids, I mean 45-year-old men).
Core Report
Star Fox 64 decompilation hits 2.0 – Starship, the Star Fox decompilation slash port from the same folks behind Ocarina of Time's Ship of Harkinian port, just got a major 2.0 release, featuring improved mod support, new cheats, "HUD aspect ratio customization independently from game aspect ratio," and a lot more. If it wasn't already the best way to play Star Fox 64, it almost surely is now.
Jotego debuts Wonder Momo and Hopping Mappy – Jotego's Patreon subscribers can now play two new games on the MiSTer or Analogue Pocket. And by "new" I of course mean "like 40 years old" as these two Namco arcade games are! If you aren't a patron, you may be more jazzed about the Fairyland Story now being available to all. Oh, and, uh, Pac-Land.
Update All for MiSTer adds viewing, GBA borders, and speed – The extremely handy updater tool for the MiSTer got yet another speed boost, but if you don't like seeing logs go by in a blur with no chance to read what actually got updated, you can now use its new log viewer to take a gander at all them improvements. It also has some new graphics to display around the edges of a Game Boy Advance game. Developer Robert Peip is working on a new GBA core that they'll eventually be compatible with.
Translation Station
Wonder Trek sets out on safari – "An absolute banger of a game," says translator Chapu: "Fun action, challenging puzzles, luscious environments, a killer soundtrack and a great story. This one was a personal favourite of mine, I wanted to translate it for a long time." Aesthetically I'm at an absolute loss for what to make of Wonder Trek, which was released in 1998 for the PS1 — this is a wild looking game, I believe mixing pre-rendered sprites with some flat colored 3D models and some other textured polygons? Why did I fixate on this aspect of the game? I don't know! That Sphinx-like guy just really freaked me out!
Good pixels
Enjoy the glory of more new mulitplayer Chromehounds screenshots for the first time this decade, courtesy of OpenCOMBAS member Fish.
