Xbox 360 hacked for homebrew and bigger hard drive?

An anonymous yet trusted source in the Xbox hacker community just released a few sceenshots to show his rather impressive progress -- if it turns out to be legit. One shot displays an expansive 451GB of free space on the default hard drive -- implying he's managed to finagle a new 500GB drive into the 360 -- while the other two purport to be views of Xbox 1 homebrew running on the 360. Both capabilities would be pretty major developments, but they'd also make for a couple of rather easy Photoshop jobs, so we'll just have to wait to see what comes of all this. Even if they've managed to emulate Xbox 1 hardware, the development community will have just as much of an uphill battle as the backwards compatibility team at Microsoft does to get things like XBMC running full-on (total redevelopment notwithstanding). And that's a big if.

[wildklymr @ Jun 28th 2006 8:47AM]

Do you notice the slight pixilation around the "451 GB free"? where its not around the words "Hard Drive"

[mike @ Jan 12th 2007 7:02PM]

That's standard JPG artifacting and it appears around everything in the photo due to the fact that it's a -- you guessed it -- JPG.

[blay @ Jun 28th 2006 8:58AM]

Looks to me like Avalaunch running on a standard xbox, and XBMC, also on a standard xbox, w/ the new xbox360 skin applied... I'd almost make a bet on it.

[tk. @ Jun 28th 2006 9:10AM]

Someone needs to hurry up and mod it, to make it worth buying, like the xbox.

So let's hope it's legit and not just the photoshop job that it seems to be...

[CommanderAce @ Jun 28th 2006 9:14AM]

Those slight pixilations are only on Engadget's edit of them, the real ones are at Xbox-Scene, where there is a 40+ pages of discussion on the subject. The most likely theory is that 'they' have somehow exploited the Xbox 1 emulation to load Avalaunch

[John Stracke @ Jun 28th 2006 9:28AM]

Wait, doesn't the XBox 360 use a PowerPC? For it to emulate the original XBox, with its x86 chip, they'd need something like QEMU. (Bochs would work, too, but it's much slower; QEMU has a JIT to speed things up.)

On my old iBook G3 (500MHz), QEMU yields an emulated speed of about 16MHz. The original XBox ran at 733MHz, or about 45 times that fast. The Xenon in the 360 has runs at 3.2GHz, or about 6 times the speed of the iBook. Now, say the extra efficiencies of a modern PowerPC give it a 50% boost; that's 9 times, or about 144MHz for the emulator--definitely not usable.

That's just using one core, of course, since I'm pretty sure that's all QEMU can use. If someone wrote a multithreaded emulator, they *might* be able to use all three of the Xenon's cores, getting the emulator up to 432MHz--maybe usable, but certainly not speedy. At the same time, they'd have to write emulation for the XBox's nVidia GPU, which QEMU doesn't have.

In short, getting even a marginally useful emulation speed would be a massive development effort. If anybody had been working on that, we'd have heard about it already.

[joe joe @ Jun 28th 2006 9:34AM]

if you zoom really close there is a box around the numbers and part of the lettering next to the numbers.. i say fake... besides mine is bigger http://img377.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xbox7ws.jpg

[Julien Oster @ Jun 28th 2006 9:45AM]

John Stracke: errr... the XBox 360 is backwards compatible to a lot of XBox 1 games. So, Microsoft actually having built an emulation into the 360 (limited in compatibility, but quite impressive in performance) is a pretty well known, and official, fact.

And please, don't confuse the speed of a CPU with the amount of MHz it has.

[Geoff @ Jun 28th 2006 10:01AM]

"In short, getting even a marginally useful emulation speed would be a massive development effort. If anybody had been working on that, we'd have heard about it already."

There's this little development team called Microsoft. They've been working on it for a while now.

You see, many original Xbox games are playable on the new Xbox 360. They are quite literally running in an emulated environment created by Microsoft. Specific tweaks are made to the emulator to accomodate specific titles.

If someone could trick the Xbox 360 into thinking a homebrewed Xbox game or app, such as Avalaunch, were one of the supported titles and it did not have any specific needs beyond those already supplied to that title by the emulator, it could theoretically run just as it would on the original Xbox.

That's the idea, anyway.

[Bjarke Andersen @ Jun 28th 2006 10:22AM]

Dunno about the 500GB harddrive hack itself. But for the Avalaunch in the background, isnt that just a matter of having the DVD firmware hack and boot up avalaunch/xbmc for the old Xbox. Xbox360 is backward compatible.

[John Stracke @ Jun 28th 2006 10:29AM]

Julien wrote: "So, Microsoft actually having built an emulation into the 360"

...arrgh. I didn't know that, and assumed they hadn't, since the Engadget article says, "Even if they've managed to emulate Xbox 1 hardware".

Julien wrote: "And please, don't confuse the speed of a CPU with the amount of MHz it has."

It's a ballpark thing. You'll note I fudged on an extra 50% due to the efficiency of a modern PPC over the G3.

[Steven @ Jun 28th 2006 10:36AM]

John Stracke, Microsoft actually purchased the company that made VirtualPC. They modified it for the XBOX 360. I believe it is much faster than QEMU and Bochs.

[Tim @ Jun 28th 2006 10:51AM]

John, The 360's processor is also tri-core, which would allow for the emulation to be split into multiple threads, lets say one for code translation, one for running the translated code, and one for spinning NO-OPs at 3.2GHz.
The 360 has plenty of power, Now if only they would make some more games to utilize that power.

I hope this is real, as long as it doesn't void my warranty I'll try it.

On a side note, has anyone tried to run OS X on the 360?

[monal @ Jun 28th 2006 10:52AM]

I was reading through the x-s 40+ page thread on this "hack" development, looks like analysis on whether this is a photoshop is inconclusive.
Interesting to note that the Avalaunch folks have already given props to the hacker who released these screenshots on their homepage.

[Terdinglage @ Jun 28th 2006 11:34AM]

Also Team Xecuter confirmed its legitimacy. And if your interested read the 40 pages of BS, you will be graced with so many people like the ones in this blog saying it could be the XBMC Skin (have they ever even seen the skin?!?) or some other BS. My call, like on x-s is that this is legit.

[Shaun B @ Jun 28th 2006 12:30PM]

why would you need about 500G on your xbox anyway? hmmmm.

[monal @ Jun 28th 2006 12:53PM]

so i can store my billions of ROMS of my NES,SNES,Genesis,n64 games of course!!!:)

[Matt @ Jun 28th 2006 1:23PM]

Even if they managed to get an exploit working under the emulator, Microsoft can just release a dashboard or backward compatability update and kill it.

[Shaun B @ Jun 28th 2006 8:10PM]

good point there matt, but do you have to update the dashboard?

[monal @ Jun 28th 2006 11:30PM]

MS can force updates not only via live but also via newer games that are released. Of course this tactic was tried by Sony with the PSP and the hacker community stayed one step ahead and kept on releasing exploits for every update............

[Rob @ Jun 29th 2006 9:14AM]

If i remember correctly doesn't the original filesystem limit the size of the hd to 120gb. If this is the case and assuming too that emulation would still have this limitation(as it would still be using the same binaries just they are interpreted) i would suspect that it isn't running under emulation or that this is MC360 on a Xbox 1

[RobM @ Jul 13th 2006 11:38AM]

Ah hem, this took me about 5 seconds: http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/6060/360largerhdava6qj.png

I have no idea what font the 360 uses, and if I really wanted to I could look it up... but I don't want to, but you get the point.

-RobM

[adamtheluck @ Jul 17th 2006 6:54AM]

I agree with everyone else, its a fake. dont people remember the "psp hacks the 360" video? it was exactly what it said, a video, (or a dvd to precise) being played on the 360 showing a psp hacking the 360. this could possibly be the same and being played on a pc and a screen shot taken..... now i know i'm not the smartest guy in the room but come on your insulting me know...

[Minh @ Aug 10th 2006 1:46AM]

Hic