TeamUIX
TeamUIX
| Information | |
|---|---|
| Founder(s) | JbOnE/Gcue/BobMcGee |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Website | https://teamuix.net |
| https://twitter.com/officialteamuix | |
History
TeamUIX has a long storied history. Beginning as a group assembled by Gcue and JbOnE in conjunction with xboxdash[.]net's #xboxdash on EFNet called tHc (the Hacking crew) and building off Gcue's TrueBlue MSDash Patches tHc ultimately became a re-distribution of the original Xbox Dashboard using patches and XIP mods from the community.
A variant of tHc called tHc Lite was released, and featured some cooler features such as skins, requiring minimal XBE patches to color codes, patched in reboot and shutdown features, as well as the ability to take screenshots and read from extended partitions thank to black magic from fuck_db.
During tHc Lite's popularity another variant of it was released that caused some bad blood in the dash modding scene. This was BlackStormX. Which was a modification of tHc Lite with some additional features but focused on re-creating the rezn8 Dashboard style seen in many of the prototype videos, introducing the "DNA" style many people came to love.
The already niche community was split into two factions, BSX and tHc. About a year into development, JbOnE announced he had received access to some source that would allow him to add FTP and proper skin switching to tHc. This was teased as tHc Final. Around this same time, BSX announced they were working on bringing the dashboards XIP engine to neXgen by Team XboxOpenSource.
tHc Final then became XboxDash.NeT to honor the original IRC channel and domain where the community began. Eventually XboxDashNext BugBash Beta was released with many of the previously announced changes implemented, sans FTP support.
Shortly after the announcement of XDN's bug bash beta, and the neXgen announcement, a video was posted to the Xbox-Scene forums talking about something..new.. This was the worlds first look at user.interface.x, with a built in file manager, 3 different dashboard styles: Stock, tHc, and BSX. Built in FTP, a game disc ripper, all with the MS dash at its core. This also announced that the beef between tHc and BSX was done and over, and a new team was created. TeamUIX.
The first release of UIX came with some bugs, but other than that people were excited about a completely customizable version of the Xbox Dashboard. Around this time we also seen releases of Dash2GAM and NeoDashX which were also modifications of the Xbox Dashboard source tree, born from the work of different members of xboxdash[.]net who didn't see eye to eye with JbOnE. Specifically, fuck_db worked with the french Geux forum and 2GAM to produce Dash2GAM.
While on the surface it appeared that there was beef amongst these multiple projects, inspection of the code leaks in the 2020's indicate that much like mod chip developers, they all worked together and kept some features to themselves for their specific flavor.
In 2004 an announcement was made to finalize UIX for the original Xbox with UIX2, which was a complete internal overhaul of the MS Dash source tree. Removing certain restrictions such as XIP's in favor of folder structures and modifying the internal scripting language to use a base set with modular extensions as other XAP files. UIX2 would also remove the FTP functionality, and utilize Xbox Neighborhood from the development kit as its method of file transfer, UIX2 was able to patch any bios it ran on in memory so that Xbox Neighborhood would function after booting to the dashboard.
Unfortunately, some members of the IRC channel took it upon themselves to release private builds of UIX2 that were not feature complete and could potentially damage xbox consoles. They released these builds with "fixes" and called themselves Enigma.
The Enigma project lasted for about 4 months, until they were virtually blacklisted from all scene channels on EFNet, and the forums.
With the rampant trading and repackaging of these internal builds as something new, JbOnE, Gcue, ImOkRuOk, and others lost interest in UIX as a public project all together. Eventually leading to the project being completely abandoned in favor of very specific internal builds being built and worked on amongst a small handful of the IRC staff.
Fast forward to 2020, and we're in the middle of Covid, Ryzee is releasing the OpenXenium. Milenko sees a post on r/originalxbox about UIX and users wanting to get in touch with the original developers if possible. Since 2003 ImOkRuOk, Mattie, gasclown, acidbath, ILTB, Odb718 and Milenko stayed in touch. These 7 people were presumably all that remained of TeamUIX outside of the actual developers going MIA. Based on this chance reddit post, they decided to re-launch TeamUIX, even if it was simply as an informational archive for others to observe. So Milenko starts connecting dots, talks to Derf, talks to Crunchbite, #old-scene is created on the Xbox Homebrew Discord and different people start coming in.
This channel on discord and the persistence of some of these members, their friends, as well as identifying users who were long thought to be gone, helped spawn one of the largest "scene booms" since the death of Xbox-Scene[.]com in 2016:
- Xbox-Scene Discord
- ConsoleMods Wiki
- Team Resurgent
- The Repackinator Project
- The Nexgen Engine
- The xboxscene.org live archive and forum
All of the projects listed above, in some fashion were affected during covid, be it reconnecting old friends, donating a domain, or giving someone that nudge to finally rip that band-aid off and make a change. Without this random group of people, bored out of their minds during Covid, and members of TeamUIX having weird memories.. TeamUIX would have fallen into the halls of history and remained there untouched.
Projects
- XBE Shortcut Maker
- tHc Dashboard
- tHc Lite Dashboard
- BlackStormX Dashboard
- XboxDashNext
- User.Interface.X
- UIX Lite
- UIX Ultra Lite
- goXIP
- xbeGO
- Pinecone