This seems to be a fairly complex hardware hack to pull off, and it only works 25% of the time. This will possibly satisfy the hardcore homebrew community, but I have doubts about whether they'll be able to refine the process into a single low-cost mod-chip.

This is definitely a good step forward though. At this rate by the time the 360 is retired from the marketplace we'll have a reliable boot method that allows everyone to turn their old 360s into media servers/toasters/whatever.

Well, it works 25% of the time you try it. And if it doesn't your modchip can full-reset and start over - statistically it already is "reliable", all it means is a longer (variable-length) boot cycle.

That's true, and you can probably assume that people who will be doing this will use their 360s as media/file servers which need minimal restarting.

While I have only the most elementary understanding of the concepts these exploits use (even more elementary in such a low-level hack as this), there's always an undeniable bit of adventure to reading them. It's espionage and subterfuge on a microscopic and high-frequency scale.

This might be a bit of a leap, but I really hope this ends up in Xbox Media Center / Boxee for the 360. I'm not sure how difficult porting x86 code to PowerPC is (aside from endianness), but a guy can dream.

I was a huge fan of XBMC on the original Xbox, but I don't really see much practical use in achieving the same thing on the Xbox 360 given that you can buy or build dedicated HTPC boxes (including ones that run modern XBMC) for as much or less than the 360 hardware these days.

I agree, Acer makes the Revo and Zotac has a few for example that between $200-300 get you up and running with nvidia ion for native gpu rendering of HD.

Xbmc doesn't really need to run on 360.

Yeah, that's a good point. I'll settle for emulators, then.

A new DLink Boxee box is around half the price of a new xbox.

The Xbox 360's processor is PPC. GP was referring to the difficulty of porting XBMC and its underlying codecs to PPC.

On that front, XBMC already runs on PowerPC[1]. It also already has some flavor of Direct3D bindings, since the original Xbox used D3D 8. No idea whether PPC/D3D 9 would be hard or not.

[1] http://xbmc.org/download/

All of the libxenon stuff is linux based, so it has no way to get at the Direct3D code built into the original written by Microsoft OS.

This differs from the original Xbox where most of the "homebrew" was written for the Windows derived OS and ran under it, thus could take advantage of all it's features.

What would be very interesting is getting MinGW for Xbox 360 working, and then getting an OpenSSH server working as well.

Here come the aimbots...

:(

If it's anything like the existing JTAG SMC hack, it will be detectable by Live, and modded consoles will be banned automatically in under an hour. Despite this, determined cheaters buy expensive KeyVaults from other modified but unbanned consoles to get themselves back online for a short while.

Try playing some of the older CoD games (4/WaW), they're full of various types of cheaters.

WaW and MW2 were full of them during their respective year of glory. BO has had a lot less glitches than previous installments.

Black Ops has had its share of glitches, but it is updated far more often than MW2 ever was so they are patched out quickly. MW2 was basically abandoned due to the implosion of Infinity Ward/Activision, which is why there was hardly any DLC for it (relative to being such a huge selling title) and very few updates to fix known glitches.

Didn't play WaW, so I can't speak to that one.