LCE Xbox Series S Dev Mode Port

A port of Minecraft: Legacy Console Edition (4J Studios, Xbox 360 build) to Xbox Series S Dev Mode as a UWP application. The game runs natively — no emulation.

Status: Fully playable in-world. B button, sky rendering, and chunk loading all working.

---

How it works

The Xbox 360 Win64 game binary (MinecraftClient.dll) runs inside a thin UWP shell (LCE.Xbox.exe). The shell creates a D3D11 device and CoreWindow swap chain on the main thread, then spawns a background thread that loads the game DLL and calls the exported GameMain(device, ctx, swapChain, featureLevel) entry point. The game stores the injected D3D objects in globals and skips its own device creation — everything runs in the same process with no cross-process overhead.

Three shim DLLs handle platform differences transparently:

Shim	Purpose
dxgi.dll	Intercepts CreateSwapChain → CreateSwapChainForCoreWindow
xactengine3_7.dll	XAudio2 backend for XACT .xwb/.xsb audio banks
xinput9_1_0.dll	Passes Xbox controller input through to the game

Key fixes in this port

• B button — Xbox Dev Mode shell posts WM_QUIT to the game thread on B press. The game loop now swallows WM_QUIT when running on Xbox, and SystemNavigationManager::GetForCurrentView()->BackRequested is marked handled so the UWP shell never suspends.
• Black horizon — Sky plane geometry extended from 384 to 512 units so it covers the full far clip at all camera angles.
• Swap chain — FLIP_DISCARD replaces FLIP_SEQUENTIAL for correct single-frame rendering.

---

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2022 with:
  • Desktop development with C++ workload
  • Universal Windows Platform development workload
  • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.19041.0 or later)
• Python 3 + Pillow (pip install Pillow) — for placeholder assets
• Xbox Dev Mode activated on your console
• gh CLI authenticated (gh auth login) for release management

---

Project structure

LCEDevMode/
  LCE.Xbox/                  UWP shell (IFrameworkView, D3D init, CoreWindow pump)
    App.cpp                  Main shell — D3D setup, game thread, BackRequested hook
    SharedSurface.h          Shared memory layout
    Package.appxmanifest     UWP identity: BanditVault.LCEPort
  Shims/
    DXGIShim/                CreateSwapChain intercept
    AudioShim/               XACT3 → XAudio2 shim
    StorageShim/             Xbox Live save APIs → flat-file I/O
  source/                    LCE game source (read-only reference — never edit)
  PackageContent/            Assembled package tree (output of build.ps1)
  LCEDevMode.sln             Visual Studio solution
  build.ps1                  Full build + package + sign pipeline
  generate_assets.py         Generates placeholder UWP tile/splash images

---

Building

1. Generate placeholder assets

python generate_assets.py

2. Build and package

.\build.ps1 -Config Release

Produces a signed LCE_Xbox.appx in the project root.

3. Deploy to Xbox

1. Open Xbox Device Portal: https://<xbox-ip>:11443
2. Go to My games & apps → Add and upload LCE_Xbox.appx
3. Launch from the Dev Home dashboard
4. In Dev Home, highlight the app → View button → View details → set App type to Game

---

Installing a release

Download LCE_Xbox.appx from the latest release and sideload via Device Portal. No build required.

Note: The package is signed with a self-signed dev certificate (CN=BanditVault). Xbox Dev Mode accepts self-signed packages without needing the certificate installed separately.

---

Known issues

• Audio shim parses .xwb/.xsb banks but full XACT cue playback is not yet wired to SoundEngine.cpp
• UWP tile images are placeholder — not representative of the game
• Sentient telemetry and Xbox Live leaderboard stubs produce log spam but are functionally harmless

---

Credits

Port by BanditVault / veroxsity
Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/veroxsity

Minecraft: Legacy Console Edition is the property of Mojang/Microsoft. This project is for preservation and research purposes only.