I found possible evidence of wow development for Xbox360 & Playstation 2 [Mac 3.3.5a]

[tosha96]

I'm not really sure where this goes, so I just put it here.

So, I disassembled my 3.3.5a wow today with otx. (otx is a tool for disassembling mac executables, so you can look at their assembly code). I did so with the intention of trying to create a Model Edit Fix for mac, but when I was looking through the output file I started finding some interesting text and function names. What I found were some errors that were given specifically when the game was run on a console, and files for building the console version. Below are lines of code that contain the console specific errors, and the console build source file path:

008ab3f0  b8d087ba00			  movl		  $0x00ba87d0,%eax				On Xbox 360, this memory address passed to FMOD must be physical, (ie allocated with XPhysicalAlloc.) 

008ab42c  b85c89ba00			  movl		  $0x00ba895c,%eax				PS2 only. fmodex.irx failed to initialize. This is most likely because you forgot to load it. 

008ab44a  b8a88aba00			  movl		  $0x00ba8aa8,%eax				PS2 only. Not enough memory or resources on PlayStation 2 IOP ram.

008ab454  b8f08aba00			  movl		  $0x00ba8af0,%eax				        Not enough memory or resources on console sound ram.

008ab47c  b8c88bba00			  movl		  $0x00ba8bc8,%eax				Tried to use a feature that requires hardware support. (ie trying to play a VAG compressed sound in software on PS2). 


00117e1c  c744240404afb500		  movl		  $0x00b5af04,0x04(%esp)		        /Users/Shared/BuildServer/wow1/work/WoW-code/branches/wow-patch-3_3_5_A-BNet/WoW/Source/Mac/../Console/ConsoleClient.cpp

As you can see, this gives some substantial proof that Blizzard was at one time, or still is developing WoW for console platforms. WotLK is a few years old though, and the PS2 is pretty outdated, so I doubt its really current information. However, I'm going to update to Cata and decompile that also. If I find anything else in there, I will post an update here.

Also, if anyone doubts that these lines of code actually exist, I can give you the settings I used for the disassembler so you can disassemble and see for yourself.

Any questions/comments?

[Confucius]

Blizzard likes to fool around with the idea of going to console, but they haven't really thought of a good way to do it. Here is an old interview from a dev about it.

Blizzard Thinks About A Console World Of Warcraft "All The Time," Prospects Dim - G4tv.com

[Castseven]

A couple things:

- The error strings you listed aren't Blizzard's, they're from FMOD, a commercially available sound library which is multi-platform. Blizzard just uses FMOD for WoW like many other games. See: FMOD - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Sounds to me like "ConsoleClient" does not refer to a "game console", but the console in the game client.

Sorry to burst your bubble. That being said, I imagine they've considered / investigated putting WoW on a console at some point, but I seriously doubt any files or data from it ever made it into any release builds.