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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this. Hacking was huge on the 360, as was piracy that JTAG thing using the cooler runner and browning out the processor after slowing it, there were multiple mod chips and finally the ODEs coming out the wazhoo.

The funny thing about security is it's about the weakest links they find.

So you can harden link A as much as you want if link B is a dud all the extra work on A was wasted energy.

What's most impressive is Xbox realised this and added in Dev mode.

What's shocking is Sony knew this from the PS2 era and gave it up!

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I had an xecuter mod on the first Xbox and a 2TB hard drive, you could do so many many things with Xbox Media Center on the very first Xbox - FTP your games over.

TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC. One of the greatest things about the 360 out of the box was it played popular video codecs directly from USB storage - unmodded!

Unheard of at the time.

I had an early model PSX console in high school and bought the plug and play mod chip online in 2000 or so. Rented a lot of games and bought a lot of verbatim blue bottoms

Later a USB plus 1 wire mod chip for the PS2 that let me play backups and homebrew

>TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC.

According to sources, a modified original Xbox running the latest XBMC was put on the center podium, was shown off, and the executives had ordered the engineers to "make the new xbox do this"...and it was.

The 360's early media capabilities were absolutely unheard of for the time

I was blown away when half way through the setup of my 360 my desktop running Vista helpfully chimed in saying it found the 360 and offered to let me stream all my MP3's right to it while playing games

Apple and Amazon are only now adding the group watch functionality that Netflix had on the 360. I really don’t know why this fell off because it was really popular within my friend group and we’d watch a movie together a couple times a month.

I have an Xbox 360 that has never played a game in its life, but served many years as a media center extender. Microsoft really did get that thing right.

> What's shocking is Sony knew this from the PS2 era and gave it up! This applies to the whole early XBox story. Microsoft learns the right lessons... Sony learns the wrong ones.

XBox vs PS2: XBox was faster, but PS2 launched earlier, was cheaper, and had more games, so won the generation.

XBox 360 vs PS3: Sony reacts to Microsoft by making the PS3 more powerful than the 360 and more expensive. Microsoft reacts by getting more games and really doubling down on Halo (the biggest draw to XBox back then). XBox wins the generation.

Note: this is from memory, didn't check sources!

FWIW the "PS3 is faster" is still debated to this day, mainly due to the Cell's "weird" architecture

If you remove the SPE's from the equation (which many developers did) the PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU, while the Xbox has a 3.2Ghz Triple Core (6 thread) PPC64

The extra threads aren't directly as useful as games back then were almost entirely single-threaded, a trend that has only begun to really change course in the last decade or so (partially due to the Xbone and PS4 having anemic Bulldozer derived CPU's that had weak single-thread performance)

>PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU

IIRC it's not even a dual core but a single core with two threads.

Sony really dropped the ball with the PS3 chip.

It's a shame they invested hundreds of millions or even billions in this new, hot, complicated to use chip, only for it to be completely surpassed by off the shelf x86 parts.

Sony though the chip would be so good they could sell it to be used in super computers for years to come, but by the time it was out, x86 had basically caught up and no customers cared about buying their cell processor.

>XBox wins the generation.

The winner of 7th generation was clearly Nintendo with their Wii: over 100 million units.

And the funny thing is 2nd place: PS3! Just at the end of the generation it managed to outnumber X360.

Yup, MS really threw it all away with their Kinect play.

And then they took this strategy into the XBox One generation: everyone gets a Kinect! For $100 more than the competition! And it's always listening, and you have to have it connected for the system to boot!

Piling onto that with "we're getting rid of game sharing or the resell market" and "our new console is going to be your entertainment hub, i.e. it's going to be jammed full of shit most gamers don't want!" and the launch was just... ugh.

Xbox One premiere was a disaster since the design reveal. I saw it and was like "you must be kidding". Original X1 doesn't look like magnetowid - my magnetowid looks way better! Xbox One S is what X1 should have been since the very beginning.

Hell, they knew it from the PS1 era: Net Yaroze may not have stopped people from trying to hack their PlayStation 1, but it definitely appealed to a part of the crowd that would be most interested in that sort of thing. (And they even included a toolchain! Truly must've been special to be a part of that.)

I think the trouble is that people kept finding ways back from arbitrary code execution in a limited environment to running pirated games and cheating in online games, and Sony continually failed to actually manage that.

All or nothing thinking about security misses the point entirely.

Security is about reducing the frequency of events, and the impact of those events- Not making things philosophically impossible.

> Hacking was huge on the 360

It was! I was a pre-teen then but I remember modded controllers and getting into modded lobbies. The only modding I did was USB modding my avatar and gamerscore, only to login a month or so later to the prompt that my account was banned forever.

PS3 had Linux, until Sony pushed an update which killed it off. It was also trivial to upgrade the hard drive.

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