This is not the most difficult mod ever, but digg loved it enough to kill Ben’s site before I could post it yesterday. Ben’s been doing a slate of consignment mods lately. This time he stuffed the guts of a PS3 six axis controller into an Xbox 360 controller body. Ben’s starting to act like a XBox 360 borg… His site is back up for now, but it’s awaiting some dns updates as it moves to a sexier hosting plan. Look while you can.
Xbox Hacks197 Articles
Bonus: XBox 360: Modified Gentoo For Easier Booting
[XanTium] passed this along to me, and did a nice job of writing it up. You’ll still need those old kernels, but here’s the scoop:
“A modified Gentoo LiveCD and new KingKong Shader Hack have been released for the Microsoft Xbox360 console that will allow you to boot Linux on your Xbox360 pretty easily! The new shader hack no longer requires a serial connection on your 360 and will load the XeLL bootloader directly from DVD. Once the bootloader ran you can insert the ‘Xenon’ modified Gentoo Minimal 2006.1 LiveCD and run Linux. As this hack uses the Hypervisor Vulnerability it will only work on Xbox360 consoles with kenrel 4532 or 4548 (downgrading is not possible at this moment as Microsoft blew-up eFuses in CPU to prevent kernel downgrades), to run the shader hack you’ll need the Xbox360 King Kong game (modified with thew new shader patch mentioned above) and to run this modifie d game disc you’ll need to flash the Xbox360 DVD-ROM drive with a modified firmware.”
XBox 360 Linux Bootloader Released
[XanTium] let me know that there’s finally an Xbox 360 linux boot disc. It takes advantage of the hypervisor vulnerability, and It takes some effort – compiling, executing over a serial cable, after loading some modified files, etc. It took long enough, but now you can roll your own if you want. (Personally, I just use an Ubuntu box with DVI and optical audio.)
XBox 360 Homebrew A Comin’
Usually I like to see a full implimentation before posting stuff like this.. An anonymous developer put out some screen shots of his MAME360 app running on a developer system. Why care? A hop over to [Bunnie]‘s blog points out a recent vulnerability in the Xbox 360 Hypervisor. Thanks to [XanTium] for the original tip.
Guitar Hero Guitar Controller
[Chuck] sent me this How-To on building your own custom Guitar Hero controller. I love the idea – the stock controller is a bit small for me. This one was built for a Child’s Play fund-raiser, so maybe you can score it and help get some games to some kids in need.
Remember, there are just 20 more days to get your entry in for the Design Challenge!
One Handed Xbox Controller
I’m going to have to poke Ben to tell me about these things when he finishes them. He’s released his one handed xbox controller. This one was built by request of a veteran of Iraq. He re-designed the layout and re-positioned the entire right half of the controls to make the controls available to a one handed user.
How do you get a SUMO bean bag, an iPod, and some sweet hardware to hack on? Submit a design to the Hack-A-Day Design Challenge. You’ve got 22 days to submit your design!
DIY XBox 360 VGA Out
Ben Heck put up his latest How-To on Engadget today. [I got the night off yesterday] He points out that MS was kind enough to leave all the pins in the xbox video connector, so we can add our own VGA port and get some real Hi-Resolution out of it.
[yes, today’s hack will be up later. ]
