No Love From Microsoft For Xbox Modders

RandyOo writes: "Only 4 days after news of an XBox port of MAME was posted to Slashdot, Microsoft contacted the admin of mame.net and downloads have now been removed. Knew I should have downloaded it earlier this morning ... Thank goodness for P2P!" And scubacuda writes: "According to The Register, one group of Xbox hackers have decided to halt development on its Xbox mod chip. It will be interesting to see how other developers follow suit."

Comments

Xbox = a window on Palladium

[Alien54]

And so we see the mentality that brings us Palladium.

do you think that if they are doing this with X-Box, that they won't do something similar with Palladium?

It is all that trademark control of the user experience thing happening all over again.

Re:Xbox = a window on Palladium

[homer_ca]

This is certainly the direction that Palladium is taking. Hardware that refuses to run unsigned code. However the only way to keep this model secure is for Microsoft to hold all the signing keys. Otherwise people could keep buying low-priced shareware developer keys and leak them to the Internet. There must be some way to accomodate student and hobbyist programmers or else they'll lose most of their developer community.

Re:Its gonna be a cold day in hell

[jgerman]

And you know what else? Fuck them. They chose a poor business model. I don't care if it's standard practice in the console market. If I want to do something with a piece of hardware I purchased then I'll damn well do it. This bullshit has got to stop. I don't owe them a profit, and I'm not going to bottle up my enjoyment of life for the benefit of a corporation.

Since people like to compare microsoft and autos

[rw2]

Microsoft: If cars had improved the way software has we'd all be driving a million miles an hour uphill on a shot glass of fuel and the car would cost a dollar.

New response: If cars were like the xbox, we'd be sued for selling after market parts and only be able to buy gas from approved vendors at a dollar a gallon premium.

Re:Mod chips... *shudder*

[tuffy]

Mod chips should be called "Piracy Chips." There is absolutely no legal reason to own a modified console.

Untrue. If one wants to play legally purchased imported titles on a legally purchased console, the only way to do it is to bypass the technical (not legal) region restriction placed on the console by the manufacturer.

Granted, many console mods are done for the sole purpose of piracy. But there are most definately reasons to mod a console for reasons other than piracy.

Re:People still use X-Box?

[DeionXxX]

Mmmm.. no use for Xbox HD, no Inter-Web games?? I believe Morrowind shows what the HD on the Xbox can do. They pre-load the huge levels they have on the Xbox and poof, no more long load times. Add to that unlimited storage for save games and information about the game and poof you've got one of the best reasons to have a HD in your console. As far as internet games, people have been playing multiplayer Halo and other games for months (like a month after the xbox came out). There is quite a large community of players and hackers. Also, MS's plans on internet play are by far the best of the 3 consoles (Nintendo doesn't have a plan really... PS2 is like you'll have to buy these $50 games and then pay $10 to each of the Publishers for the right to play on their network! No thanks to that, 3 games = $150, $10/month * 3 * 12 months = $360/yr, $150 + $360 = $510/yr just to play 3 games on the PS2.)

I agree that there have been some lackluster games on the Xbox, but it has enough hits that justify for those. The PS2 had NOTHING for 1 year!! They had no good games, and at the end of the year when the Xbox came out, they got GTA3 and FFX etc...

I'm tired of people bashing the Xbox based on its parent company. Fight MS on the PC side, but let them try to create some competition in the console market. We (the consumers) are the only ones to benefit from this competition. I'm tired of only have Sony or Nintendo as an option, because they don't compete against each other... those that buy Nintendo's products will continue to buy Nintendo products, and those who buy Sony products will continue to buy Sony products. The XBox bring a nice refreshing burst of competition, developers for the PS2 are now having to make their games look much nicer and concentrate on the visual aspects as well as the gameplay elements and Nintendo developers are now creating more mature games.

So in closing... just stop being ignorant... I'm tired of ignorance on Slashdot, are we a community of well educated tech people or are we a community of ignorant bafoons that have nothing better to do at work then spread FUD.

-- DeionXxX

Re:It's only the binaries

[Cutriss]

Not EULA, but Microsoft's property. Apparently binaries compiled with the XDK end up with some part of them still copyrighted by Microsoft, so they clearly have a case here.

Virulent licensing indeed. And Microsoft complains about how the GPL contaminates projects. :)

Well, technically, all of Microsoft's software is Microsoft's property. It's never "given" or "sold" to us, but just licensed. So it is a EULA issue.

How Microsoft wishes to explain the fault is something different, but it's the same either way. But, at any rate, good luck fighting the fight further (if you plan to).

Re:Its gonna be a cold day in hell

[Dark Paladin]

The line of circular reasoning rather silly, don't you think?

If a company makes a product, I am not obligated to make sure they make money at it - only that the product is useful/enjoyable to myself. That's it. End of my commitment. If I buy War and Peace and use it to beat my groin in a strange masturbatory experience, then Tolstoy shouldn't get all pissed off - he got his money, and I got a bruised crotch.

The same thing applies here. Microsoft's plans for their product do not override *my* plans for their product. Once I've spent the money, they can try to *entice* me to buy games - but if I want to use the Xbox as a doorstop, there's nothing on earth they can do to stop me. Paperweight? My right as a consumer. Potted plants? Same thing.

Put in a mod chip to run Linux so I can put Mame/DivX/a SNES emulator? Still my right - all they can try to do is entice me to spend the money *they* want me to. If they decide to pull the product off the market - that's fine. Perhaps someday there will be a vendor who *will* put that kind of product on the market, and then they will be the one to make money.

Re:Its gonna be a cold day in hell

[pmz]

You license the hardware, you don't own it.

Tell that to the secondary market. Hardware is a physical tangible hard-to-copy thing that is owned. If I had an X-Box, I could take little wires and a soldering iron and do anything I want to its innards, risking only voiding the warranty. If I just wanted to use the CPU to keep a little cup of tea warm, I could, and you couldn't stop me.

If you ever tried that with my gaming console (yes, I'm a developer for a major game company, not MS), I'll send my lawyers after you so fast you'll be in jail getting assfucked by Bubba and his friends.

Whatever.

Re:This quote from The Reg caught me...

[SirSlud]

If you can find me a publisher and programmer of any of those titles who depends on royalties from those games to live, please contact me.

Otherwise, who the hell cares. The best part is, the only people that get up in arms are the companies and their lawyers. Ive yet to hear the designer of Astroids complain bitterly that he didn't get repaid for every Asteroids rip off out there.

Microsoft (and old videogame authors, publishers) can kiss my fucking ass. They'd been paid in spades. Look at the gaming industry right now .. did the fact that PacAMan, Asteroids, etc were copied by thousands upon thousands of clones (freeware, shareware, and commercial) somehow hurt the game industry and prevent its ability to invest in games? Looking at the market these days, I cant really believe they are detremental to the point of requiring vigilent lawyer-based protection. If they dont need it, they cant have it. Sorry.

Its like a next door neighbour with a house 4,000,000 bigger than mine who's pissed off because I'm blocking the sun to one tiny basement window at the corner of the mansion.

Yes, there is a smidgen of irony in there, but if these games' royalties are so valuable, they'd be advertising them and selling them in bundles other than "Top 20 Arcade Hits" etc bundles. Even then, thats 'recycled' innovation, not something I want to support monetarily. Anyone that wants to play Joust, Centipede, etc has undoubedly paid their dues at the quarter-eating-boxes, etc years ago.

Compare this to books: do you really think you should have to buy your favorite books every 10 years, because the paper you read it on becomes obsolete and unavailable every decade?

Actually, Palladium == Xbox 2

[Namarrgon]

You do raise a good point, but Xbox was incompletely locked down. The boot decryption code was placed in the MCPX chip, where it could be snooped as it crossed the HyperTransport bus on the way to the CPU to be executed. Still requires a hardware mod to bypass it, but the point is the decryption keys get exposed, and it CAN be bypassed.

What Palladium is proposing is that the boot decryption keys are embedded in the CPU itself. They need AMD & Intel's cooperation for this, of course, and now they have it. This way, it's all but impossible to modify the boot code or to view the encryption keys, except perhaps by shaving the top off the CPU & examining the ROM mask directly with a (very) high-powered microscope.

Palladium may not take off (there's going to be a lot of privacy concerns, and it's going to be very difficult to secure comprehensive industry support, or it just won't fly), but they sure as hell can implement it in Xbox 2.

Even this approach can be defeated by e.g. bugs, human error, social engineering etc etc, but it makes things a lot harder to crack/reverse engineer from the hardware/software aspect. Look for Xbox 2 as a feasibility study of the Palladium concept.