I talked to Seamus back in March and he revealed a bit more about the easter egg. I was asking if he would give us any new hints since it's been so long and no real progress has been made.
GoTeamScotch said:
Is there any scrap of into you're willing to share? Like does it have to do with having a piece of hardware present? Does it only happen when a controller, a memory card, a karaoke microphone (etc.) is plugged in?
Seamus Blackley said:
GoTeamScotch said:
As in the thing you have to do to trigger it is "random"? (not easily guessed) Or it appears randomly? (based on a random number)
Seamus Blackley said:
Yes based on a random number derived from startup chaos.
And I'm not sure if I've shared this yet so I'll copy this here as well:
GoTeamScotch said:
Can you tell me if its something that happens (gets triggered and then appears) or is it something that is already visible on screen and people just haven't connected the dots?
Seamus Blackley said:
"The former" referring to the first part of my message: it
gets triggered and then appears.
To re-cap, here's a few important reminders about what we know about the easter egg:
- It is NOT something that is already on screen that we just haven't noticed yet. It is something that appears after being triggered.
- When it does appear, it is "obvious" when it happens. This implies that it's not something you'll have to look hard for in order to find when it happens.
- The thing that triggers the easter egg to appear is NOT something that the user directly controls. Seamus said that it's based on "a random number derived from startup chaos". So at some point during the startup procedure, the system generates a random number and if that number equals some value, then the easter egg is triggered. The way that random number is generated is through "startup chaos". This could be based on any one (or combination) of things. It could be a precise timer that counts how long it takes for some action to happen. It could be how fast the fan happens to be spinning. It could be the temperature of the CPU. Or something else entirely.
So if it really is random like Seamus says, then we have two options:
- Setup a wall of Xboxes that are rebooted every few seconds with their video output being recorded and analyzed for differences until one Xbox happens to luck-out and trigger the easter egg.
- (the much more reasonable option) reverse-engineer the startup animation. For example:
"use tracing stuff in xemu to generate an IDC file for an IDA database commenting which code paths weren't taken on kernel load"
-Mike Davis, Xbox EasterEggs Discord server, May 2021
Many have already tried looking through the source code for clues, so I lean on not encouraging that route. I wouldn't be surprised if when this egg is finally cracked that people are going to be able to go back and find it in the code, just like how the
Dev Credits easter egg (a.k.a. the "timmy" easter egg) was found in the code
after it was revealed. So going in from that direction is still possible, but might be finding a needle in a haystack. There's also the possibility that the easter egg doesn't exist in the code (maybe it was added later?). I lean on agreeing with Mike. If this is going to be found, then deconstructing the compiled retail BIOS using PC tools is probably the most likely way to find it.