Slashdot Mirror
The Hacker Behind "Hacking the Xbox"
chromatic writes "ONLamp has just published an interview with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, author of Hacking the Xbox. Bunnie discusses the effect of the DMCA on his work and the state of Xbox hacking as he sees it."
Long in the tooth? Linux isn't the only reason to have an Xbox (gentoo installable in one or two mouseclicks on a modded xbox btw). I know it's karma suicide to praise Microsoft on slashdot ;) but your used machine from eBay isn't going to have half the quality TV output that the Xbox has. Xbox is one of the greatest things a shoddy company like Microsoft has ever produced. It means that the modded xbox I have sitting in my living room now plays xbox, psx, amiga, snes, megadrive and arcade games. It's hooked up to the LAN so I can listen to my mp3 collection or listen to shoutcast streams. I can stream videos from the LAN, or simply play them from the huge hard drive I now have installed. I can stick a CF memory card into my computer in the other room and we can all view the pictures taken earlier that day on a big screen TV.
All accessible from the couch via the xbox's dvd remote control.
The debate on why you should bother modding an XBox comes up quite frequently, but most people can't seem to get pass the "Q: Why Bother A: WaR3z / Linux" debate. I use my modded XBox as a media player... and it really is very very good. All my MP3s and films (all legal of course!) sit on my pc and the media is streamed down to the XBox. The XBox, in turn, is plugged into my home cinema equipment via an optical connection. Since I don't own a dedicated DVD player or one of those fancy hifi mp3 players, the XBox does the job perfectly and with the added advantage that I can play games on the thing. Sure, I could use a shuttle pc or something, but why bother? An XBox, even included the cost of a mod chip and the remote control, is going to be much less than the cost of a "proper" peecee. Besides, its really nice having the remote control for it.