Hackers Happily Hacking The 360 41
m3lt writes "Hackers have purchased the XBox 360 so they will have generation 1 models, which are more prone to security flaws. At hackaday there is an article about Xbox 360 First Impressions.
More importantly though, it looks as if homebrew browsers are already showing up for the Xbox 360." Additionally, geekylinuxkid writes "It looks like another bounty is being offered for linux on a console. This time it is for the xbox 360 and is provided by the guys at free360.org. Join in, donate, and contribute to the community."
Xbox 360 (Score:1)
Re:Xbox 360 (Score:2)
Re:Xbox 360 (Score:2)
Links (Score:1)
Re:Links (Score:2)
All the links are already broke (Score:2)
Early adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things that made the original Xbox so great was that it is based on the x86 architecture. Porting applications to it is very easy, and as such, you got great software projects like XBMC for considerably less work than if you had to port it all by hand. What's more, codec support is improved because of the architecture. Emulators for other systems was also a bit easier for this same reason.
With the new, incompatible architecture, porting existing projects to the 360 will likely take quite a bit more effort. Emulation in particular, which often makes use of assembler instructions, may be a long time coming. We also don't know enough about the security on the 360--it may be that mods will have to be specific to each unit, making said mods more costly and possibly more dangerous (easier to screw up the installation).
I'll definitely be following the scene and watching the progress, but for now, I can't justify that kind of expenditure for this gamble.
Re:Early adoption (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Early adoption (Score:2)
Re:Early adoption (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on how you count cost. ... the admins tell me that it's the same cpu...
The shop where I work paid many times more for each CPU in our servers than the entire 3-cpu xbox retails for
I suspect that there will be some good efforts into clustering these things -- they are sold below hardware cost!
Re:Early adoption (Score:4, Insightful)
If the homebrew scene doesn't take off at all, be it through architecture changes or security measures, then the machine has less value in my eyes. The only reason to buy one now, at the highest retail price it will ever be at, is to avoid future security measures that could prevent modding. I'm just not willing to take the chance that the homebrew scene will be big enough to warrant owning one AND that the security will increase later on to preclude modding altogether.
Incidentally, that I have these opinions sort of exhibits the fact that I'm not interested in piracy. A pirate would want a first generation box because anti-piracy measures will probably be less robust. And piracy will almost certainly exist even if the homebrew scene itself never really takes off.
Re: cpu cost (Score:1)
the original xbox cpu at 733mhz (similar to a celeron) was well and truly an antique years ago
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
Wow!! must be a slow server...
The 360s CPU is definately not meant for servers. The VMX(Altivec/Vector) units are next to worthless for server; IBM's Power4 and Power5 CPUs don't even have VMX units. The lack of branch prediction and OO execution will make the 360's CPUs rather slow at running pretty much anything that wasn't optimized for them.
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
Re:Early adoption (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Early adoption (Score:2)
thanks for the links nonetheless. im sure someone here can start getting acquainted with the cell architecture now and have the homebrew already brewing once the ps3 rolls around.
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
Porting applications to it is very easy, and as such, you got great software projects like XBMC for considerably less work than if you had to port it all by hand.
Don't forget the emulators! Look for the "Bad Ass Emulation Disc". 14 emulators, over 14,000 ROMs. We spend more time playing Dr. Mario on the Nintendo emulator than we do playing xbox games.
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
Re:Early adoption (Score:1)
1) Go to favourite xbox torrent site.
2) Look for BAED torrent (~4.5 gigs, full DVDR)
3) Click link
4) ???
5) Profit!
XBMC mostly coded from scratch (Score:1, Insightful)
The main thing that will hinder open source development is a decent development environment - XBMC is built using the Microsoft XDK (xbox developers kit) - if the 360 devkit isn't leaked, then that will slow things down a great deal.
Trouble brewing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Trouble brewing (Score:2)
That was the XBox license. 360 mandates vivisection for the first offense.
Seriously, though, they're never going to go after anyone for homebrewing unless that person is also a pirate. Unfortunately, anything which enables homebrewing also enables wide-scale piracy, so there you go.
Fair Use (Score:3, Interesting)
Free60.org (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't Homebrew Encouraged? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's stopping any Dev from making a NES emulator for example, and selling it on the marketplace for 100 points? Is there restrictions on what you can and cannot sell on the marketplace?
I know linux is a different story, since it's an OS replacement, but I don't see any reason why the Mozilla Foundation for example couldn't make a 360 port of Firefox and sell it for the points equivalent of $0.25 over Xbox Live.
Re:Isn't Homebrew Encouraged? (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe the items end users can sell are more like cosmetic changes for games such as skins.
Re:Isn't Homebrew Encouraged? (Score:2)
Re:Isn't Homebrew Encouraged? (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are they going to get the 360 dev kit and development license? That kind of thing tends to be really expensive. Not to mention the signing issue brought up by another poster.
Re:Isn't Homebrew Encouraged? (Score:2)
The Code S
Re:Isn't Homebrew Encouraged? (Score:2)
Would they also let you download an xbox media center that makes their Windows MCE obsolete?
I think it's going to be not free for a while (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not much of an incentive and actually is more insulting than inspiring.
What happens? (Score:1)
I sense another Westoning (Score:1)
Well, nice to know... (Score:2)