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

Update: Over at InFeCtuS are new diagrams showing off the X360 “BIOS FLASHER” –

I received an email from an anonymous fellow directing my attention to a YouTube video… It comes from team “InFeCtuS” who claim to have successfully dumped the Xbox 360 NAND BIOS. Apparently this flash mod is capable of reading & writing the Xbox 360′s internal BIOS; theoretically, allowing you to downgrade!

Microsoft’s got mud on their face, what a big disgrace, InFeCtuS kickin’ their butt all over the place!

Check out InFeCtuS’ official website

Remember “Zephyr?” At the time it was only speculation… But now, today, it’s official — the Xbox 360 Elite!

The Xbox 360 Elite features HDMI and comes with a 120GB drive. It’s scheduled for release April 29th and will retail for $479. The 120GB drive can be purchased separately and will cost $179 — it comes with a cable and the required software to migrate from your old 20GB drive.

And you guessed it, no integrated HD-DVD drive. Damn you, Microsoft!

- source: engadget

It was mentioned a few weeks ago, and now with a little technical know-how, you too can boot Ubuntu Linux on the Xbox360! That is, of course, if you’re running one of the following [exploitable] kernels: 4532 or 4548. As well, you’ll require a copy of King Kong, and Xtreme Firmware must be flashed on the 360′s DVD-ROM drive.

Courtesy of Cpasjuste is a how-to detailing the steps to boot Linux. Click the source link for those instructions. Awesome!

- source: Cpasjuste

A group of anonymous folk have developed various Linux-PPC patches which enable support for Xbox360′s hardware under Linux kernel 2.6.20. A post made to ozlabs’ mailing list indicate a loader is already in development and should be made available in the near future.

This series of patches add support for the Xbox 360 gaming console.

…

To actually run this, you need a special loader which exploits the recently announced vulnerability. This loader was developed seperately and should be available soon.

Of course this is only limited to Xbox360 kernel 4532 and 4548, for now, as it takes advantage of the Hypervisor vulnerability.

view diff-style patches here

- source: ozlabs.org

More good news on the Xbox360 homebrew front, well, potential good news for those running kernel 4532 or 4548… Reportedly there are a few ports in progress: MAME and ScummVM. The announcement comes from a trustworthy source over in the x-scene forums. Currently these are only running on test / development / debug kits; however, with the recently exploited Hypervisor, Xbox 360 retail owners may be in luck.

In light of the recent 360 hack and possibility of widespread homebrew in the future, I wanted to share some news with you and X-S.

I’ve been working on a port of MAME to the 360. I call it ‘MAME360′.

Now for a bit about the project:

• It’s based on MAME 0.112 and is fairly easy to keep up-to-date (doesn’t need any messing around with like Mameox on the xbox).
• Originally it was based on SDLMAME but I’ve since ported a 360 specific osd layer (so SDL for the 360 exists – as an aside I also have a port of ScummVM in the works too).
• Mame doesn’t include any dynarec cpu emulation on anything other than an x86 platform. So any game that is PSX or N64 based for example doesn’t run at all well.
• Most other stuff (that I’ve tried) runs pretty well.
• At the moment it will only run on 360 dev/debug/test kits. Whether it will ever run on a hacked retail box remains to be seen.

Things are looking up!

- source: xbox-scene

Thanks FRAK.

crawler360 has successfully executed unsigned code (“Hello World!”) on the Xbox 360 via King Kong the recently announced Hypervisor vulnerability. Released is the binary, source, and educational README detailing absolutely everything you need to know.

Thanks to Anonymous Hacker’s great work, I’ m now able to publish my own little implementation of the exploit.

I’ve used the full version of the King Kong game, as it has been shown to work by these anonymous people at 22C3, and it was the first one I found with editable shaders. Most games have these – KK was just the first one I’ve checked.

So you need a KK full (USA or PAL doesn’t matter, they are the same) DVD image (including video partition), and obviously a hacked drive firmware. You could also try hotswapping from your (hopefully existing!) KK original to the modified copy. Then you could go with a stock firmware.

Why not using the KK demo? It would work the same (though the shader file format is different), but requires a firmware hack too, as the possibility to run it from DVD-R was blacklisted in a very early kernel already, which doesn’t have the vulnerability.

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To clarify things again:

• If you have 4552, you are screwed. Sorry.
• If you have 4532 or 4548, it has to work. If it doesn’ t work, something else is wrong, but please don’t try to update.
• If you have pre-4532: Grab http://assets.xbox.com/en-us/hardware/HD_DVD_10-2006.zip (check MD5SUM first: microsoft could have changed this file! the correct md5 is cd4db8e2c94266ab73513c361dd5b8f6) Burn it to a CD, and start it. It will update your console to 4532.

Download: Xbox 360 Hello World Homebrew

- source: xbox-scene