Xbox 360 Hacks - News, Hacks, Cracks, Mods.

Update: xbox-scene has posted some further features and developments with the kiosk demo disc:

* Our users report you can change the .wmv files by other ones and they’ll play on the 360 (without Windows MediaCenter PC)! Example changing ‘/videos/pgr3.wmv’ file with another wmv-hd video will allow to play your wmv-hd video by booting the disc and going to games>pgr3>play video.
* PI’s nfo file says: “datafiles on this disc isn’t signed in any way”. PI is right here, but many people don’t understand this correctly. They mean datafiles like wmv, png, … aren’t signed. XEX/EXE files are still signed. The reason these executables run on recordable media is no ‘hacking’, it’s simply because Microsoft set the ‘mediaflag’ so it can run from DVD+-R too. Nothing is changed in the XEX files on the disc, so the signatures (in XEX header) are still valid.
* You can’t use this disc to boot retail discs/games (like by placing them in the /demos/ dir) as those are set by Microsoft so you can only run them from DVDXBOX(360) media (and might have a DVD physical structure check too?).
* Everything is playable, also the game demos (each has its own XEX/EXE file)
* If you add/remove files on this demo disc it’ll still boot (as long as you don’t remove essential stuff like /default.XEX of course), so this demo disc has no integrity test of the DVD.
* I’ll also boot from other media like CD-R (like putting 1 game demo on a CD-R).

Here are some other interesting details from Arakon on the xboxhacker.net forums:
* It’s a simple ISO file you can read it with any ISO extractor. You can also browse the burned DVD in explorer.
* The Live Arcade games are infact standard flash games (atleast Hexic is). You can run Hexic in a browser that has the flash plugin installed. So the default.xex in the hexic dir might not be more then a flashplayer. He tried replacing the hexic flash file with another swf file, but the Xbox crashed (black screen) on that. If working … it could be interesting for some homebrew flash games :)
* The playable demos are not accessible if the Xbox 360 launguage is set to German (it probably only works if set to english).
* There are more videos and pictures on the disc than those accessible via the Xbox 360 interface.

Team PI has released a self-booting ISO image of the kiosk demo disc - your Xbox360 will actually boot this from a DVD-R! It’s been tested and confirmed working. A quote from the nfo over at console-new.org.

*** YES YOU CAN BURN THIS ISO AND PLAY IT IN YOUR XBOX-360 ***
Microsoft left us with this blanket statement:
“Xbox 360 retail kiosks have started arriving at retailers.
Due to the nature of the distribution process, not all kiosks
are hitting simultaneously, but are continuing to pop up in
retailers across the country in the coming weeks.
The kiosks are designed for a retail environment and feature
game samples, game trailers and product information.”
Team Pi leaves you with this Pillow statement:
“It seems Microsoft was in such a hurry to get this stuff out
that they forgot to set the media protection on this disc.
This leaves hackers with the posibility to hack around with
this disc that load from a normal DVDR5 backup! - Team Pi

Great news! Look forward to future advancements from this discovery!