Velocity-Next

Velocity-Next is a continuation of the original Velocity project, which ceased active development some time ago. This fork aims to modernize the codebase, add new features, and maintain compatibility with current operating systems and toolchains.

What's New in Velocity-Next

• On-demand privileged helper: raw device access without relaunching the app or right-clicking — UAC on Windows, polkit/sudo on Linux
• Typed device diagnostics: permission, not-found and busy failures are reported instead of a bare "no drives detected"
• Friendly folder names: the device browser can show DOOM II (584109B6) instead of raw IDs, toggled by Ctrl+Click on the Name column (raw mode stays available)
• XEX and SVOD open from the device tree, not only from packages and ISOs
• XUIZ, STRB, ZIP and text viewers (CJK encodings) in the package browser
• Hardened FATX: corrupt cluster chains, zero-length files and non-512-byte sector sizes are handled safely
• Smart Pointer Refactoring: Modern C++20 memory management in XboxInternals
• MSVC 2022 and MinGW, CMake 3.20+ presets, standalone XboxInternals library

Getting Velocity-Next

No packaged release has been published yet. Until the first release is tagged, build from source using BUILD.md. Release archives keep velocity-device-helper next to the executable, which the app needs for raw device access.

Credits

Original Velocity was developed mainly by Stevie Hetelekides (Hetelek) and Adam Spindler (Experiment5X), with contributions from many others. Velocity-Next continues their work with gratitude and respect for the foundation they built.

Raw Device Access

Velocity always starts unprivileged. Reading a raw disk usually needs administrator rights, so when the first probe is denied the app starts a small helper (velocity-device-helper, shipped next to the executable) that performs only the device I/O:

• Windows — the helper is launched with a UAC prompt; the app itself keeps running as the logged-in user. No right-click or administrator shortcut is needed.
• Linux — the helper starts through pkexec, or through passwordless sudo when available. Adding your user to the disk group also lets the app read devices directly.
• macOS — there is no elevation helper yet; run the app with sudo.

Declining the prompt is not an error: the app reports that administrator access was not granted and simply leaves the device list empty.

Running Velocity-Next

1. Keep velocity-device-helper in the same folder as the main executable.
2. Start the app normally; it asks for elevation only when raw device access is denied, and only for the helper process.
3. If a drive still does not appear, BUILD.md documents the manual fallbacks (run as administrator, disk group, sudo).

About Velocity-Next

Velocity-Next is a cross-platform Xbox 360 file management application built with Qt 6. Browse, edit, and extract content from Xbox 360 hard drives, USB devices, game saves, profiles, and disc images.

Supported File Formats

• FATX - Xbox 360 filesystem (hard drives, USB devices)
• STFS - Game saves, profiles, DLC packages (CON/LIVE/PIRS)
• GPD - Gamer profile data (achievements, avatar awards, settings)
• XDBF - Xbox database files
• ISO - Disc images (GDF, XGD3, Redump formats) with file extraction
• XEX - Xbox executables with metadata parsing
• SVOD - Secure Video on Demand packages
• YTGR - Avatar asset packages
• XUIZ - Dashboard package files, with extraction
• STRB - Avatar asset blocks
• ZIP - Archives inside ISO images and packages
• Account - Profile account data inside STFS packages

International Text Support

View text files from Japanese, Chinese, and Korean game discs with automatic encoding detection:

• Japanese (Shift-JIS), Simplified Chinese (GBK), Traditional Chinese (Big5), Korean (EUC-KR)
• UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1
• Manual encoding override available

Licensing Information

Velocity-Next is licensed and distributed under the GNU General Public License (v3), continuing the license of the original Velocity project.

Velocity-Next is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

If no copy of the GNU General Public License was received with this program (FILE: COPYING), it is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Third-Party Components

Velocity-Next includes the following third-party libraries:

• Botan (BSD-2-Clause): Cryptography library embedded as amalgamation build. See LICENSE-Botan.txt for full license text.
• Qt 6: Cross-platform application framework (LGPL v3 / GPL v3). Qt is dynamically linked on every platform and shipped alongside the executable.

Build System Acknowledgments

• Botan CMake integration adapted from Tectu/botan-cmake