Xbox Hacks

197 Articles

Recover Borked HDD After Xbox 360 Ban

November 25, 2009 by 33 Comments

[Incudie] tipped us off about a method to fix a borked HDD in your Xbox 360. Many of the one million consoles banned earlier in the month also had the hard disks scrambled making off-line gaming impossible as well. It turns out that this is caused by having a ban flag in the NAND chip on the motherboard. It has been discovered that because of wear levelling, the NAND will have two copies of the “secdata.bin” file which stores the ban flag. Please note, this will NOT allow the console to use Xbox Live, it just re-enables the HDD.

The quick and dirty of the fix is as follows: First the NAND is dumped from your Xbox 360 to a computer. After verifying the file, it can be opened in a HEX editor and the two copies of “secdata.bin” located. Once identified by date, the older version is injected on top of the newer to overwrite the ban flag.

Looks like this is not for the faint of heart, but if you got banned for modding in the first place this should be easy to pull off.

Update: Looks like xbox-scene now has a collection of apps to help you with this process. [Thanks CollinstheClown]

FreeBOOT Gives The Xbox 360 JTAG Hack New Life

October 20, 2009 by 39 Comments

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There has been another development in the never-ending battle that is Microsoft trying to keep its gaming system closed to unauthorized use. Xbox-scene reports that a new hack called freeBOOT v0.01 allows the Xbox 360 to upgrade to the newer kernels, but allows the option of rebooting to an older kernel in order use the JTAG exploit and gain access to the hardware.

In case you missed it, the JTAG hack is a way to run homebrew code on an Xbox 360. Exploiting this hack makes it possible to boot a Linux kernel in about five seconds. We’ve long been fans of the homebrew work done with XBMC on the original Xbox and hope that advances like this will lead to that end. We want this because the older hardware cannot handle high definition content at full resolution but the Xbox 360 certainly can.

This exploit is still far from perfect. It currently requires that the Cygnos360 mod chip be installed on the system. A resistor also needs to be removed from the board to prevent accidental kernel updating. That being said, this is still progress. If you’re interested in step-by-step details, take a look at the text file instructions provided.

[Thanks wdfowty]

Ben Heck Gets Sloppy And We Love It

September 23, 2009 by 18 Comments

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[Ben Heck] is a name synonymous with game system hacking. His projects have been seen and praised by people all over the world for both their quality and their ingenuity. He’s so good, in fact, that many of his projects have gone far beyond what we typically think of as hacking. They look and feel like commercial products. While that is a fantastic accomplishment, we have a soft spot for seeing stuff that is truly hacked. This lasted job he did is a great example. The controller needed to work using a single hand, so he hacked it. He was in a hurry, so it didn’t get his usual professional finish. We kind of like it that way. This one handed controller mod can be seen in action after the break.

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Your Music In Rock Band 2

August 30, 2009 by 9 Comments

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[Peter Kirn] over at Create Digital Music takes an in depth look at the process of adding your own music to Rock Band 2. This involves using REAPER audio production software, uploading your work via the XNA Creators’ Club, and then playing the fresh track on an Xbox 360. Both REAPER and the XNA Club cost money, and the total price comes out somewhere between $100-$160. The process is now in closed beta but a wider beta is expected in September followed by a full release in October.

Xbox Crammed Into Inch-thick Package

August 19, 2009 by 24 Comments

Xbox Micro

Reminiscent of [Ben Heck]’s portable and laptop console mods, [Bandit5317] over at Xbox-Scene managed to fit the guts of an original Xbox into a custom-built slim case that measures just 2.5 centimeters thick. In his post, he describes some of the difficulties of cutting down a behemoth Xbox to a third of its original size, such as rewiring a custom IDE cable to avoid the extra 1/16-inch it would take to fold a standard one. The case is hand-crafted, (no laser cutter!) no-frills box made of painted polycarbonate, and man is it sexy. It is built off of a v1.4 motherboard running a third-party BIOS and with a 320GB laptop hard drive. Load up XBMC Media Center and you’ve got the slimmest home theater PC on the block.

[thanks FranklyCrafty]

Snes On An Xbox360

August 17, 2009 by 34 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBDYbRxYax4]

Surprisingly the Xbox 360 hasn’t seen a lot of homebrew action. [tmbinc] has taken it upon himself to port the Snes9x emulator to it. There’s no pretty GUI, and its not running on top of linux or anything. This is native, directly to the hardware emulation. He believes this is the first to do so. Unfortunately, it will not work on the most up to date Xbox 360s.

[thanks xb0xguru]

Guitar Hero Macro Board

May 3, 2009 by 13 Comments

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Doesn’t look like the Guitar Hero hacks will be slowing up any time soon. In this recent installment, [Thunderhammer3000] built a board to record Guitar Hero “songs”. It is wired inline with with the fret buttons and strum bar and records each of the key presses. Songs can be recorded at slow speed in practice mode and replayed at full speed. The board is Arduino compatible and has two optoisolator chips for collecting the button presses plus a small EEPROM for storage. The board fits easily inside the guitar body.