I realized that rom-properties (an open source tool you can grab here: https://github.com/GerbilSoft/rom-properties) can scan an Xbox ISO and tell you information about the default.xbe that's used. If you had a folder of isos you can run this against the folder using a wildcard, and pipe the output to a text file, you'll get the build dates for all the games so far in the set. Of course, there are games that have multiple .xbes, but this at least takes care of default.xbe.

Unfortunately I don't think many people have an entire set to scan this tool against. Would anyone be willing give it a shot?

Currently we report EXE dates for PS1/PS2 games based off of the file time stamps on the default executable the game is loading. While other systems (especially ones that don't conform to traditional disc based file systems) may not always report the same information, I did notice that Microsoft Xbox games do contain this information in every default.xbe as part of the standard certificate information.

https://github.com/Cxbx-Reloaded/XbSymb … /Xbe.h#L71

For example, in "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge" (NTSC/US), at 0x114 in the .xbe - the dwTimeDate information is stored in four bytes little endian. In this case, my copy is 42E44C54 big endian, or Jul 24 21:20:04 2005.

Regardless, I think this information is useful for differentiating between different versions of games. This information is especially crucial for us, since we work with prototypes of games a lot and the information from the comparable retail version isn't readily available.

If you're interested in seeing this information for yourself, I would recommend XBE Explorer which you can grab at the bottom:

http://dxbx-emu.com/downloads/

It'd be nice if this information could be gathered with a script on an entire set and just imported into Redump.org's database. Maybe eventually DICUI could also have the means of getting this information as well to make submissions easier too...