Halo Maps Forum

To begin, I am part of a community that still plays Halo:CE for the xbox competitively. I've played since release, have attended national tournaments, played with the best etc.

On a competitive level, the game is as good as and is as balanced as Counter Strike (PC) with one exception: Host vs Off-Host.

The host box always has a distinct advantage over the Non-host box, due to the delay in game information. Since the game is run on the Host box, gamestate is calculated here, and sent over the network to the off-host box. This creates (even on a 3 ft crossover, LAN) a delay for the non-host box.

I am a software developer, and understand the stack down to the hardware level. Host box calculates game state which is stored in RAM on host box. Then this information is packaged up by the H:CE netcode, sent to the eth0 interface, across the LAN, to the eth0 interface on the non-host, and then this information is processed by the CPU and the same gamestate is stored in RAM on the non-host box (roughly 0.5 - 3ms later than host box). Then gamestate changes on the non-host box are sent back across using this same stack.

My Question:
Could xbox hardware / software be modded / emulated in such a way that you effectively have 2 copies of H:CE running simultaneously on a single motherboard (maybe 2 processors or multi-core processing), and instead of halo sending gamestate changes across the ethernet stack via the built in netcode, to instead do direct RAM -> RAM data movement. Via something a la bitblt? or some other hardware level data transfer.

This would effectively minimize the Host vs Non-Host factor to as small as physically possible by current computing hardware limitations.

Does anyone have any insight into doing something like? Can somebody point me to some xbox hardware experts? H:CE software/memory/modding experts? This has been a dream of my LAN crew for a long time.

Thanks guys!