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Hacking the XBox
There are many reasons why you might want to take apart your XBox, but one of the best ones I can imagine is making it easier for people who can't see, hear or move too well to play the same video games as the rest of us. Searching Microsoft's web site for documents containing both "handicapped" and "xbox" reveals only a suggestion for how to change the degree of difficulty of your Zoo Tycoon Game.
Someone who might want to retrofit a new pointing device or some other enabling gadget onto the XBox might start with the chapter describing how to fix a real USB cable onto the XBox. The chapter, like most in the book, is heavily illustrated with step-by-step pictures and instructions for clipping the cables in the right place and soldering them back together. Some of this might seem a bit rudimentary, but the detail can't hurt. In many cases, the real challenge is finding a way to take apart the case or the pack of wires in the right way. Smashing it isn't always an option. This is a book about mathematics, electronics, and taking apart plastic boxes.
Alas, just doing a bit of soldering isn't going to be enough unless you can make the right drivers. To help those who might want to reprogram their XBox, Huang devotes much of the book to stripping away the layers of the XBox security system, a story that is part mystery and part journey through the security layers in the system. The book is arranged in a very roughly chronological order. While it is mainly a book that teaches you how to reverse engineer the XBox, it is also a story of how he overcame the obstacles presented by the encryption. He talks as much about the unsuccessful paths as the ones that paid off. (This is, I think, an ideal model for the scientific community. It's much more educational than the terse papers that present the results as fait accompli.)
This part of the book quickly gets quite complicated, because Microsoft obviously tried hard to produce a secure machine that could provide a fair platform for people to play games. Getting the XBox to run any old software is not an easy task, but Huang describes several major techniques for drilling through the various layers of security. Again, he offers detailed pictures and instructions for construction special tools that snarf signals from a bus. Then he explains how he managed to grab the right keys for decrypting some of the most important data. Although it's a technical book, it unfolds like a spy novel.
The book is also very politically thoughtful. While the clueless will equate the word "hacking" in the title with piracy, money laundering, terrorism, and not phoning home on mother's day, Huang frames every step with a discussion of whether it is motivated by good or evil. He's not interested in building a tool to pirate XBox games and points out that many of the modifications aimed at running Linux on the Xbox do not help the pirates in any way. If anything, they make the games entirely unplayable.
Huang does want to defend the right to tinker, citing Ed Felten and others in a defense of something we're rapidly losing. I've heard horror stories from Army Majors about Windows PCs that refused to boot after failing to find a C drive. Do we really want to build machines that can't be retrofitted or fixed in the field? Many war movies are saved by the young private who (like Huang) is willing and able to tinker.
If you don't respond to pulls on the heartstrings, you might want to read one of the concluding chapters from the EFF's Lee Tien about the current legal climate. There are few exemptions for tinkering and many of them are limited. Reverse engineering is okay if you're a big corporation making a competing product, but that didn't help 2600 magazine when they were accused of trying to help people view DVDs on their Linux machine. I can only imagine what they would do to someone with very bad vision who wanted to enable a special zoom feature on their Xbox.
The book was originally going to be published by Wiley, but the company balked when it realized there were stiff legal penalties for helping handicapped people use computers. Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology felt that it would be better for Huang to disassociate itself from Huang and his humanitarian efforts. The university only relented after pressure from a few good professors who helped the university understand the value in Huang's mission. Huang decided to publish the book himself with the help of his girlfriend, Nikki Justis. The two of them should be commended for turning out such a beautiful, professional book. If you're intrigued by the xbox, interested in helping the handicapped, or just trying to learn how to reverse engineer things before things get worse, check out this book. It's a wonderful contribution to the literature.
To close, I'm offering a pair of cool projects with the hope that Huang's book will inspire people to tinker:
- Sonic Information -- The sound in games like Quake is pretty good, but what if it was rendered with enough precision to let blind people grok the scene? The echoes from the tapping of a white cane already carry plenty of information to the blind. What if they could compete on an equal footing with the sighted? Who would win?
- Eye Movement Measuring tools -- Tools exist for sensing the position of our eyes. A quadriplegic game could just look in the right direction and shoot. Clearly some work would need to be done to encode all of the shift-left-left-down-right maneuvers from the games. This could help all of us. The thumb you save from repetitive motion injuries could be your own.
Note: Since this review was written, Hacking the Xbox has found a publisher in the form of No Starch Press. The original self-published version will probably be a sought-after collectable ;)
Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and ten other books. None rely on the DMCA. Hacking the Xbox is due in July at bn.com; you can also go directly to the book's page at No Starch Press. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
It doesn't seem logical that we shouldn't be able to modify hardware that we buy, but from the business perspective these consoles are being sold at a loss -- if we can turn them into PCs, both the console manufacturer and the PC manufacturers are going to feel the hurt. Not that I'm arguing that the DMCA makes sense, but some of this information probably shouldn't be widely known (thinking of the IDE card that could be changed into a RAID card at one soldier point for 1/5th of the cost of the RAID card from the company.)
Just an idea.
Many people run Windows solely for the games.
Without the games, switching to Linux is easier.
Now move all the games to Xboxes.
Voila! The desktop is now unencumbered and can
move to Linux easily.
So stop trying to hack the XBox and promote it
instead. Port all those cool Windows games?
Yay, go XBox!!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"I remember back when the cool thing was to take a celeron 100mhz processor ..."
Sorry.
There was no Celeron 100Mhz processor.
It started at 266Mhz.
Either you meant Pentium, or you're just making it up.
I'd heard about the Hacking the Xbox book before Wiley dumped it, because Wiley is publishing my Hacking TiVo book and it came up during conversations. When the news hit it was a shock - I was sorry to hear his book got canned, and have been following his story since.
:-O
With regards to my book, I'm obviously glad it didn't get similarly cut (since I've spent a lot of time on it), but now Andrew has given me another reason to be happy it wasn't cut.
These pictures from his site
(the links at the bottom of the page)
I can see my wife's reaction now...
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
I had this next door neighbor once, who liked to come over to my apartment for two reasons: the first was to hit on cute girls, the second was to play our copy of "Punch-Out" on our vintage Nintendo. sometimes he would combine the two.
Invariably, he'd come over, sit himself down, and start playing Punch-Out. No one would really pay attention, because there was always someone playing the nintendo: it was something we were used to.
Eventually he would make it to Mike Tyson. This is where people would start paying attention; a murmur would rise up: "hey, he's about to beat the game again! let's watch!". And he'd beat Mike Tyson. Then whoever hadn't been to my apartment before would be informed that the player was totally blind, and he would either play the game again just to annoy the person, or hit on her if she was cute (how would he know, you ask? well, that's a different story. let's just say my friend was pretty damn smooth...)
Turns out Punch-Out provides lots of audio cues; since he wasn't distracted by the images on the screen, he was actually much better than most. He hated that most games' use of sound was of no use to the blind...
... OR BOTH? Being interested in the inner workings of this 'mysteriously powerful black box' I eagerly voided my warranty early on my xbox. Bunnie, did sooo much more ...
,"Hacking the Xbox". I would say that he did a good job putting in content for just about everyone interested. From simple soldering tips to stuff that was just 'over my head' because I don't have the background.
This book is a good read for anyone interested in system architecture, console hardware, or just getting the best bang for your $buck$. I gained more respect for the system once I knew more about it via
Congrats to getting your publication out Bunnie!
rm -rf ms/*
For some time, some Adobe licenses would ban people from reading a book outloud. Why? Well, it can be considered a performance in some situtations and the lawyers wanted to reserve all of those rights (and royalties!) for the copyright owner. They didn't bother to think about the kids going to sleep at night or the handicapped. They just made it illegal with a few words. The penalties for copyright infringement are huge too. It sounds like a joke, but reading outloud can be against the law.