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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Impressive. I wonder how much easier this gets as consoles converge with PCs architecturally

Modern games are significantly more complex than older ones, and the consoles they run on are becoming more and more locked down to the point that some even run the games in a virtual machine (Xbox games run inside HyperV) so this kind of tinkering is becoming less and less common over time.

Aren't XBoxes basically PCs these days?

The original Xbox was a pentium 3 with 64mb of ram, running a modded Windows 2000, and a slightly custom Nvidia chip. It was literally just a P3 in a custom case, which was why it was huge. Also why the modding scene was huge, and still not paralleled. The 360 was PowerPC, but the One's have been AMD 64 w/ AMD GPUs. So, it's probably more that the Xbox OG was easy to hack, as the PS4/PS5/Xbox Ones l+ are all AMD/AMD pcs.

64mb… what is this, l3 cache or something!

Almost shocking at this point, isn't it?

Define "PC".

The XBox Series consoles don't have a UEFI or a BIOS, they have unified system/video RAM using GDDR6, they don't provide ACPI tables, and don't emulate legacy PC bits like the 8259 PIC or the 8254 PIT.

Most of that is irrelevant for modern home computers, except the UEFI. If you consider a Raspberry Pi to be a PC, then the XBox Series should probably qualify as well.

The One and Series S OS is essentially some form of Hyper-V, with a VM for apps and one for games. The one for apps is a stripped down version of Windows that only runs UWP apps. I'm not sure if the game partition is the same.

it's weird because while they support dynamic libraries the video-games filesystems are more and more immutable. thus the question is now how can I deploy my library to the game.

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