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

IGN has an interesting article about Microsoft’s upcoming spring cleaning of Xbox Live. An exact date has not yet been specified but it is rumoured to be next week sometime. Makes you wonder if there will be anything that address’s the recent DVD-ROM firmware hacks? Will you be updating your Xbox 360 live?

Next week’s spring update is filled with dozens more additions, such as the ability to see the battery charge level of a backward compatible game on the Guide blade, easier to find themes, and more.

Good news for Hitachi DVD-ROM Xbox360 owners - commodore4eva, the one responsible for the Xtreme Firmware hack [which works on Samsung drives only], has made it apparent in the xboxhacker forums he will soon be releasing a similar hack for Hitachi drives.

Sit tight and stay tuned!

This is cool - it comes from LittleJonny of Team Cavern Imports. LittleJonny has written a tutorial (including screenshots) on how to install a dualboot homebrew mod on the Xbox360 DVD-ROM drive.

“The TightMod360 (v0.43DA)” tutorial explains how you can piggyback a SST39sf020a flashrom onto the Xbox360 TS-H943 DVD drive, so you have 2 firmware chips on the drive and you can easily switch [for example] between the original DVD firmware and Commodore4Evas Xtreme firmware for the TS-H943 Xbox 360 DVD drive.

Download The TightMod360 v0.43DA Tutorial

- source: xbox-scene

Finally - it’s here! Commodore4Eva has released the first Xbox 360 backup firmware modification allowing you to boot all game backups!

Xtreme firmware features:

• Boots all Xtreme Xbox 360 backups
• Boots all Xtreme Xbox 1 backups
• Boots all Xbox 360 originals
• Boots all Xbox 1 originals on Xbox 360
• Xtreme0800 extraction firmware enables drive to function natively under Windows without any hardware conversion/adaptors
• Use on Xbox Live at own risk

Quoted from the ReadMe.txt:

Flashing your drive
Advisable to make a backup of your dvd drive firmware first.(”mtkflash r /m orig.bin”)
Please make sure you hexedit the Xtreme.bin firmware (Not Xtrm0800.bin firmware) to include your dvd drive key from your original firmware (usually at $4000-4200).
Plug SATA cable from DVD drive to PC. Power cable drive still connected to Xbox 360
Power on Xbox 360
Power on PC
Boot with standard dos boot disk with included mtkflash utility
Run “mtkflash w /m firmwarename.bin” with relevant firmware file (Xtreme.bin for running backups or Xtrm0800.bin for security sector extraction)

Refer to the ReadMe.txt for more details - extracting security sector, creating a game backup, etc…

You will however require a dual-layer (DVD+DL) burner and discs to proceed with creation of a proper backup. This firmware mod. only works on Toshiba-Samsung TS-H943 DVD-ROM drives - the Hitachi-LG drive requires its own custom firmware.

Use the image (courtesy of llamma.com) below to determine which drive you have:

The downloadable package below includes all the necessary tools to get started. Enjoy!

Download Xtreme Firmware

Discuss here

Thanks for the heads up Clive and all the others who sent it in. :)

It seems that Halo 3 will be released some time in 2007, and there’s a trailer out in the Xbox MarketPlace.

LOS ANGELES–Microsoft officially unveiled Halo 3 during its E3 press conference today, and the company released a trailer for its highly-anticipated sequel on the Internet and its Xbox Live service. Halo 3 will be the first Halo game designed for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, and the importance to the company was highlighted by the fact that Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, was on hand to help announce the game.

When the trailer was shown to the audience at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where Microsoft held its annual games briefing, the crowd erupted. Halo 2 ended in a cliff-hanger, with the Master Chief, the hero of the Halo series, returning to Earth in the midst of a climactic battle between the Convenant, an alien coalition, and Earth’s defensive forces. The Halo 3 trailer begins with a slow shot of the dusty African plains. Wreckage litters the landscape, and a woman’s voice is heard. It’s Cortana, the artificial intelligent construct that is Master Chief’s chief ally. In brief, cryptic sentences, she talks about “being the source,” and she sounds like she may have been somehow combined with Gravemind, the intelligence behind the Flood, another alien menace. As the Master Chief enters into the frame, she says in a distorted voice, “I know you. Your past. Your future.”

Suddenly, Convenant Ghosts and battleships appear in the skies. The music swells, and in the distance, a huge hatch slowly opens in the ground. A bright beam of light begins to build, blinding the camera. Cortana then chimes in, “This is the way the world ends.” The Bungie logo then flashes on the screen, followed by the text: “Finish the fight in 2007.”

Bungie, the internal Microsoft studio that created Halo, also released the trailer onto the Internet, and a high definition version was put up on Xbox Live Marketplace, the online service available to Xbox 360 owners. To quote the accompanying text found on Xbox Live, Halo 3 is about Earth under Convenant rule: “With its defensive forces, all but obliterated, Earth has fallen to the unstoppable might of the Convenant. These alien occupiers have discovered something beneath the ancient African sands - something incredible… something Forerunner.” The Forerunners are an apparently extinct alien race that built huge artificial ringworlds called Halos, and the Halo games have focused on the mystery surrounding these strange objects.

The importance of a new Halo game for the Xbox 360 cannot be underestimated. The original Halo was a launch title for the first Xbox, and was easily the biggest hit, driving sales of that system. Halo 2, which launched in 2004, became a cultural event, with thousands of gamers lining up for hours for the midnight launch. Halo 2 made entertainment history by generating $125 million in sales in one day. However, Microsoft didn’t mention Halo 3 at all during last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, and fans had been left wondering when the software giant would finally drop the big news. Well, the waiting for news of Halo 3 has now come to an end. Now they’ll have to wait to 2007 for the game itself.

Source:Yahoo
Trailers