idaxex

idaxex is a native loader plugin for IDA Pro 9.4, adding support for loading Xbox 360 XEX and Xbox XBE executables.

Originally started as an IDAPython loader, work was continued as a native DLL to solve the shortcomings of it.

This should have the same features as xorloser's great Xex Loader (for IDA 6 and older), along with additional support for some early non-XEX2 formats, such as XEX1 used on beta-kits.

XBE files are additionally supported, adding a few extra features over the loader included with IDA.

Supported formats

Includes support for the following Xbox executables:

• XEX2 (>= kernel 1861)
• XEX1 (>= 1838)
• XEX% (>= 1746)
• XEX- (>= 1640)
• XEX? (>= 1529)
• XEX0 (>= 1332)
• XBE (>= XboxOG ~3729)

Features

• Can handle compressed/uncompressed images, and encrypted/decrypted (with support for retail, devkit & pre-release encryption keys)
• Reads in imports & exports into the appropriate IDA import/export views.
• Automatically names imports that are well-known, such as imports from the kernel & XAM, just like xorloser's loader would.
• PE sections are created & marked with the appropriate permissions as given by the PE headers.
• AES-NI support to help improve load times of larger XEXs.
• Marks functions from .pdata exception directory & allows IDA's eh_parse plugin to read exception information.
• Passes codeview information over to IDA, allowing it to prompt for & load PDBs without warnings/errors.
• Patched bytes can be written back to input file via IDA Apply patches to input option (works for all XBEs, XEX must be both uncompressed & decrypted using xextool -eu -cu input.xex first)
• XBE: adds kernel imports to IDA imports view
• XBE: tries naming SDK library functions using XbSymbolDatabase & data from XTLID section

Install

Prebuilt releases are available for supported IDA Pro 9.x versions.

Copy the loader files into the matching IDA installation's loader/plugin directory, or follow the build steps below and install the resulting binary into your IDA SDK output folder.

For PPC Altivec analysis, the PPCAltivec plugin remains a useful companion: https://github.com/hayleyxyz/PPC-Altivec-IDA

Building

Dependencies are pulled in as submodules, so clone recursively:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/emoose/idaxex.git
# or, if already cloned:
git submodule update --init --recursive

Then build with the Ninja generator from the repo root:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja
cmake --build build

This builds the loader at build/bin/loaders/ (idaxex.dll on Windows, idaxex.so on Linux, idaxex.dylib on macOS). To install it into IDA's per-user directory so it's picked up automatically, run:

cmake --install build

• Windows: run the commands from a Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt (or any shell where cl.exe is on PATH).
• To build xex1tool, run cmake -S xex1tool -B xex1tool/build -G Ninja and cmake --build xex1tool/build.

Credits

Based on work by the Xenia project, XEX2.bt by Anthony, xextool 0.1 by xor37h, Xex Loader & x360_imports.idc by xorloser, xkelib, XeCLI, and probably many others I forgot to name.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Xbox 360 modding/reverse-engineering community!

XTLID parsing supported thanks to the XboxDev/xtlid project.

xex1tool

Also included is an attempt at recreating xorloser's XexTool, for working with older pre-XEX2 executables.
(The name is only to differentiate it from the original XexTool - it'll still support XEX2 files fine)

So far it can print info about the various XEX headers via -l, and extract the basefile (PE/XUIZ) from inside the XEX.

For XEX files that are both decrypted & decompressed xex1tool can also convert a VA address to a file offset for you, making file patching a little easier.