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Xbox Modchip Featuring Onboard Operating System
An anonymous reader writes "A group of talented coders known as TeamXodus, have released an xbox modification chip with a difference, the 'Xenium' is a modchip which features a fully legal operating system that was coded by the team from scratch. The mod can be installed Solderlessly and will allow the end user to unlock the power of the xbox and run applications such as Linux on their Xbox. The onboard Operating system currently stands at version 2.0 and features a massive 1.35 million lines of code and was recently reviewed by HomeCinemaChoice whereby they declared the Xenium 'The creators of the easiest Xbox modification - the complete package.'"
I think people want to mod their XBOXes less for the value factor and more for the cool factor.
All links in the story are dead. Any chance the Slashdot editors could put a little notice on the submit page saying something to the effect of "If you think this page will be slashdotted, check this box to make all links point to the Coral Cache"", then it would append ".nyud.net:8090" to all links in the story, or a [Cache] link: "Check out blah blah's site [cache] for more info".
This would take care of the 'Slashdot can't cache stories because it would rob people of ad profits' thing, because it'll give the submitted the option to cache the pages, and it would still provide an uncached link.
everyday is another shooter.
Your comparison is terrible..an athlon64 CPU alone would cost more then a whole xbox system.
Besides..which video cards have component outputs? Which sound cards have digital audio outputs? Support AC3, Dolby, DTS? Where do I get a nice interface that you can navigate with controller, keyboard, or remote? This is all pretty much standard once you drop your xbox off to someone who knows what they're doing for a couple hours.. after that, it's plug in and go.
And oh.. on more thing.. it plays some killer games. (*drool*Fable*drool*)
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the ease and versatility of it is what makes it a good choice now. of course, this being the real world, people also play copied games.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft tries to shut this down. On the one hand, it damn well ought to be legal - there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be, not even some form of copyright infringement on the firmware. But on the other hand, Microsoft is selling XBoxes very cheaply to push games, so they don't want people using them as general purpose machines. I fear this will prove my pessimistic theory that only money matters in court, but i hope not.
You would get more bang for the buck with a true blue PC. This is true, can't argue this. The only xbox benifit is that it's small, and has good tv output.
I would argue it pretty hard. The main advantage to the Xbox is that it's a ubiquitous, standard hardware platform that has a standard software layout.
If you want to add a remote control to a homebrew PC, you have a dozen different choices with 3 or 4 different technologies, some of which are supported directly by your software and some of which require extensive configuration. Some will never work at all, though you have no way of knowing this until you've spent $$ and hours of your time.
If you want to add a remote control to an Xbox, you go to Target, pay $30, and buy the remote. Plug in the IR reciever and all of the modded software is usable by remote -- you can use it to navigate through any third-party launcher, file manager or media player. No configuration, no setup, no troubleshooting.
When the guys work on the Xbox player software, they know exactly what hardware its going to run on. It's going to be a certain processor with a certain amount of RAM, etc. So they can tune the heck out of it, and if it runs choppy they know they need to work on the code, not just tell people to buy more RAM.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Dubious, am I, of such an achievement. I speak from the experience of writing code myself for many years. That is just a whole lot of code simply for the purpose of selling a mod chip to a soon-to-be obsolete product. Any coding team this good could be making a lot of money working for any major software vendor.
I would accept that they modified a block of existing, open source code, and be impressed by that achievement alone. But that's not what the summary says.
As for what the article says, well, I'll have to read that directly after the /. tsunami passes.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Indeed, it would almost appear that this review was specifically to draw the attension of those who do not yet know about the Xecuter 3 modchip that is comming out very soon. I would recomend to all out there that do not know much about this but would like to read up on it to check out Xbox-Scene
Anything you wish to know you can find there.
Something tells me these guys have too much time on their hands. I don't suppose the DMCA has any anti-circumvention prevention exemptions that make your mod legal if you have lots of lines of code in it.
Besides, if these guys are that good they should be coding a real operating system and throw it in the mix with Linux and Windows.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The X-Box is heavily subsidized by projected game sales. And that is the reason why Microsoft hates people using their hardware to do anything but play Microsoft games ... they don't make anything on the deal. Does anyone remember that Internet appliance that came out a couple years ago, which was promptly hacked with the addition of a hard disk and used to run Linux? Sure, that makes a lot of sense for the end user (cheap Linux box) but kills any business model that depends upon subscriptions or future sales to cover the costs of the hardware. That said, I hope this mod proves popular.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The vast majority of mod chips are used to allow pirating Xbox games and emulating ROMs with a real controller and TV screen. After that, it's probably to turn them into media players- they can read any CD or DVD media, and stream movies over the built-in Ethernet port, and they're designed to be hooked up to a TV or stereo. Using them as "real" computers is pretty far down the list of reasons people mod.
Maybe this person should have legally rented a copy of the game from Blockbuster for $4 or GameFly, or actually read reviews from trusted sources that told the person whether or not the game is worth buying? I'm pretty sick of justifying piracy with the "I needed to try it" excuse. As far as I can tell, no one who actually likes a pirated game on their modded Xbox runs out and buys it. It becomes more of a "I'll get around to buying it eventually" thing, which of course never happens.
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