Xbox 360 News

Andrew "bunnie" Huang is one of the main guys behind the original Xbox hacking, he's also known for his book "Hacking the Xbox". Here's what he said on his blog:

I've also been observing the progress on the Xbox360 hacking, and I'm impressed. The hacking scene is more or less an organized anarchy that is frightfully productive. Now that I've had a little brush with being a manager in my day job, I can see that clarity of purpose obviates the need for management; people just self-organize and things happen. I could ponder on this for many parargaphs, but I'll spare you my treatise on human social behavior.

At any rate, some very interesting things are afoot. Much of it stems from the discovery of an all-media bootable kiosk demo disk. Many hackers will instantly recognize the value of this, but it's still interesting to reflect on the significance of this find.

Microsoft has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its online service, Xbox Live, analysts say. To attract more online users, Microsoft is bundling free but limited access to its online service with the Xbox 360. But to play games against others, users must subscribe for $50 a year. That doesn't include the cost of games, or the required high-speed Internet access.

The Redmond, Wash., company's strategy may usher in a new era in the $25 billion games industry. Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co. are expected to make online gaming a key component of their new systems, scheduled to be released next year.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Xbox 360 is off to a much more sluggish start in Japan than it was in the U.S. Analysts estimate that as many as 800,000 360s have been sold in the U.S., while Media Create indicates that since the console's December 10 launch in Japan, the next-gen system has moved only 58,000 systems, 5,600 of which were sold in the week ending December 25.

Compare that with the 97k PS2 (17x), 598k NDS (107x) and 161k for the PSP (28x) the same week. The previous week (12-18 Dec.) the 360 still sold 8623 units. With only 58000 sold since launch there must still be plenty of stock in stores as the original allocation for Japan was around 159k. Will the release of DOA4 help?

He tried editing the shaders of the game 'King Kong' and see if the Xbox 360 would run (allow) it (using the demo on the Kiosk Demo Disc of course as it would be impossible to test this with the retail game that only boots from DVDXBOX(360)):

This game uses vector shaders, compiled with Microsoft D3DX9 Shader Compiler 9.04.91.0000. Both Vector Source and a .Bin files are there. Not that it will lead to anything, but it would be intersting if we can modify the shaders of that game... specially because it is rumoured that high level vector shaders have access tot the system memory as well.

I am trying to figure out 3 things here: 1/ Is it possible at all to mess with the shaders (simple replace blue water by red water) -> has been done as of 30-12-2005

We modified the shaders of the king kong demo. AO created All yellow shaders. Check result. The shaders are compiled run time... so you just can edit script files.
For example, to let it be all white: return float4( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
2/ Is it possible, to read from any memory location at all ,using an array overrun -> would really be useful, but i doubt if the gpu has no overrun protection
3/ Is it possible to write to that memory also -> sounds currently too impossible to believe for myself :-)

December 29, 2005 - What do you get when you cross a flashy new sports car with a high-powered, next-generation gaming system? Well, if you happen to be the Nissan automobile company and, by chance, you're friends with the people at Microsoft's XBOX department, you get the Nissan Urge: a one-of-a-kind concept coupe with a built-in, fully-integrated XBOX 360.

There are certainly many tools on the net that can do these type of things, but the Videora Xbox360 Converter is specially made for the Xbox360 and can convert many videoformats to a Xbox360-compatible wma, mpeg1 or mpeg2 video which should make it all a bit easier to stream your videos to the 360. The application is free, but of course you will still need a Windows MediaCenter PC to playback any video on your Xbox360 (or use the Kiosk Demo Disc if you have access to it - more info):

When combined with Videora, Videora Xbox360 Converter + Videora allows you to download, convert and copy video to your device, automatically using BitTorrent and RSS technology. See ITVCasting for more details.