This is great news. Hopefully this opens the floodgates towards emulation and homebrew. Not that there are really any exclusives, but it would be interesting.
This is great news. Hopefully this opens the floodgates towards emulation and homebrew. Not that there are really any exclusives, but it would be interesting.
Xbox One homebrew has effectively always been supported. Anyone can register a development account and boot the system into dev mode. IIRC in a talk about console security, a Microsoft developer noted that this was an intentional deterrent against hacking. An effort to split the community so that pirates and homebrew enthusiasts wouldn't have a reason to collaborate.
They did dumb things like limit memory availability in dev mode, though. Also they require a government ID to enable dev mode (but at least the quit charging $100 for it!). And they made it so you can't enable dev mode on consoles that are banned from Xbox services.
I understand it's still more than most console makers do, having dev mode at all, but it's maddening to me that Microsoft made dev mode so annoying and limited. I'd honestly just rather a hack be available so we have the option of using the entire memory or repurposing banned consoles.
Seems unlikely. Someone would have to turn this into a modchip, set up physical distribution networks (all very illegal under the DMCA), and it'd only work on the 2013 machines - Chen's team clearly anticipated this type of attack and were already working on mitigations around the time the Phat released. So as he says at the end, later silicon already has more glitch mitigations built in and has done for a long time. Current gen Xbox isn't even investigated but we can assume it's even harder. They were clearly paying for red teaming. Remember: ZERO software bugs in the boot rom.
I had a friend who ran a side business installing mod chips on the original Xbox in the early 2000s. There was a robust community around it, and you could buy chips easily.
This was all after the DMCA was in effect. I don’t think that will stop this sort of activity.
Very few exclusives. Couple of Forzas? Halo 5? Practically everything else available elsewhere in similar quality.
They are on PC afaik?
Forza Motorsport 5 & 6 and Halo 5: Guardians all Xbox One exclusives, I think.
I'm just excited at the opportunity to re-purpose my old launch day XBone as some kind of little homelab linux box.