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Xbox 360 Homebrew Finally Arrives
Busshy writes "Tmbinc has posted a video showing Snes 9X as the first homebrew for the Xbox 360. This coincides with the upcoming release of the Free60 project, which will turn the 360 into the most powerful console for homebrew to date, hopefully with emulators for the Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox and possibly even the Wii."
If the Xbox360 gets Wii emulation then MS may have an incentive not to stop homebrew on it as (obviously) it will hurt one of their competitors.
Now, if only Wii's gaming library didn't suck for most gamers. (And mods, no, I'm not trolling--the only console I own is the Wii, and I'm disappointed).
I saw this homebrew breakthrough earlier today, I was excited until I noticed the very important message to not update the console -- too late, I already did that a week ago (generally, I update because it's usually a good idea). Unfortunate, but I suspect I'm not the only one with the same misfortune.
Because the ability to run unsigned code directly on the hardware (e.g. not sandboxed as a user of the OS) is both great for homebrew development and the fundamental building block of a pure software loader for pirated games, this development is going to scare the hell out of the bean counters and the department heads. They're going to have to deploy most (if not all) of the tricks left in their bag of countermeasures, otherwise inside of a year the 360 will end up like the Wii and the Xbox 1 - completely and utterly cracked open for piracy.
As the Free60 homepage has already noted, MS has deployed an update to the first stage of the bootloader, something they've never done before. Such an update is risky because if it fails there is no chance for recovery, it's the equivalent of failing at a BIOS update on a PC. However it's also an effect update; it blocks the only publicly known low-level security hole in the 360, so systems with the new bootloader are fully locked down. Adding even more fuel to the fire is that this was probably one of Microsoft's last unused countermeasures, as no one in the 360 hacking community is immediately aware of any other similar countermeasures. MS may have just played their trump card as far as DRM on the 360 is concerned.
Anyhow, the point of all of this is that this is an excellent and quite scary example of increasingly improved DRM systems being deployed. It's taken just shy of 4 years to crack open the 360 to just this point, and MS has shown the ability to lock it back down with a single update*, one that they'll undoubtedly bake in to new games too in order to snuff out as many vulnerable 360s as possible. In spite of the fact that no DRM system thus far is perfect, this is clear example of where the future of DRM lies: it's going to get better.
Pay close attention to what happens to the 360, because where Microsoft succeeds with DRM is going to show up in other systems. The Zune, the iPhone, the next generation of consoles, cable set top boxes, etc, are all looking for the holy grail of DRM. And every time they fail, they get a little bit closer. With enough failures under their belts, one of these days they may no longer fail.
* The lack of the ability to fully update the bootloader is the biggest flaw in the Xbox1 and Wii. In the case of the Wii, boot1 has a signing bug and is hardcoded - any system with the faulty boot1 can ultimately be cracked by replacing boot2 with a vulnerable loader, such as BootMii
You can't use the graphics card/chip/whatever you want to call it in the Linux sandbox mode.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
I wonder if this update is why my 360 has started to RRoD in the last few days?
I got one of the first ones available in the UK and it's been fine until now. On friday it started to RRoD pretty much on alternate days, with no way to persuade it not to except leaving it. A dodgy, rushed low-level code update could explain its behaviour....