http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/ Engadget Comments for http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 8:47AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jan 12th 2007 7:02PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 8:58AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/
So let's hope it's legit and not just the photoshop job that it seems to be...]]>Jun 28th 2006 9:10AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 9:14AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/
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.]]>Jun 28th 2006 9:28AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://img377.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xbox7ws.jpg]]>Jun 28th 2006 9:34AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/
And please, don't confuse the speed of a CPU with the amount of MHz it has.
]]>Jun 28th 2006 9:45AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/
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.]]>Jun 28th 2006 10:01AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 10:22AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/
...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.]]>Jun 28th 2006 10:29AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 10:36AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/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?]]>Jun 28th 2006 10:51AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Interesting to note that the Avalaunch folks have already given props to the hacker who released these screenshots on their homepage.]]>Jun 28th 2006 10:52AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 11:34AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 12:30PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 12:53PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 1:23PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 8:10PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 28th 2006 11:30PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jun 29th 2006 9:14AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/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]]>Jul 13th 2006 11:38AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Jul 17th 2006 6:54AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/28/xbox-360-hacked-for-homebrew-and-bigger-hard-drive/Aug 10th 2006 1:46AM