A final flourish for a gaming classic - but there’s a catch.
The Orange Boxwas one of the greatest deals in gaming on its release in 2007.
However, to revisit these games today on console is fraught with issues if you’re on Xbox.
Firstly, the Orange Box has been removed entirely from the Xbox marketplace as of 23rd February 2023.
It simply cannot be bought digitally any more.
And, if you own the physical disc you’re still good to go, of course.
But that’s really no good at all for Series S users, without a disc drive.
In that case you had to buy the digital version while it was still available.
The originals on Xbox 360 always ran with inconsistent frame-pacing, introducing visible judder.
Before we go into depth on this, we can’t take any credit for the mod itself.
It turns out that getting 60fps working is relatively simple.
No hardware mod is necessary here and any retail Xbox 360 machine with an internet connection will do.
And then, once done, transfer the Orange Box user controls from the console to a USB stick.
After that, a PC program called Horizon is required.
This is a tool that allows users to decrypt and analyse Xbox 360 save games.
Here, enter the user controls file and extract the individual config files for each game.
Half Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal should each have one.
Now it’s a simple matter of transfering the user options file to cloud storage.
Fundamentally, it works.
The performance line is a faultless 60fps as you’d rightly expect of a 2004 game.
And likewise, Episode 1 holds up at a watertight 60fps as well.
But, in a way that’s part of the charm of visiting old games.
We did try adding some anti-aliasing commands to the modified script, but unfortunately, they did not work.
Of course all of this applies to Xbox Series S as well - the 4TF sibling console.
In this case, we get 1440p native on back-compat enhanced 360 games.
That’s the starting point for the Orange Box collection.
As you progress to the more taxing Episodes, performance crumbles.
The more taxing episodes take you into 40-60fps territory, however.
The point is, we’re going to need Series hardware to get the lock we want.
But what’s the drawback?
Once any change is made, it reverts to 30fps and you have to repeat the whole process again.
Perhaps worse still, it seems it’s not possible to resume a saved game either.
It always has to be a new game, or it defaults back to the standard 30fps cap.
On the upside, Xbox Series X and S have the quick resume feature that offers some workaround here.
On balance though, it’s not a practical way to play all of these games.
Could something similar happen with The Orange Box?
Could there be some kind of final hurrah for FPS Boost?
