Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox
github.com
github.com
Things like this are just cool, prevent e-waste, and preserve cultural heritage.
Pirates will always find a way, the Nintendo Switch had all the countermeasures you mentioned, the latest revisions also have a patched bootloader but someone figured out that they could still boot a custom firmware via power fault injection on the SoC.
Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug and fault injection, but the developer of the main Switch CFW project is on record that their custom microkernel is absolutely bulletproof and he expects there will never be another software exploit. If Switch 2 gets the hardware right, there's no way in.
https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1486787208333774848
https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1327721899862888448
The Playstation is the weakest of the bunch, since they run FreeBSD on bare metal there's a large attack surface and a lot of eyes on the code. The Xbox uses some variant of NT but each application gets its own Hyper-V virtualized NT instance, so to jailbreak you need to escape Hyper-V, which is easier said than done and has a $250,000 bug bounty so MS would probably be the first to be informed.
I wasn't buying something that was trying to nudge me into spending another $400 on different pixel colors, or worse, different characters, abilities, or effects.
Modern video games have adopted techniques used by the gambling industry to trigger essentially addiction, because game companies prefer 3 whales to a thousand happy individuals buying the game a single time and playing it forever happily.
Because they were not satisfied with making a million dollars off a video game. That wasn't enough money.
Nobody said that.
> though in a third world country you probably aren't entitled to basic necessities either
I think you should travel more before writing that kind of comments.
And now that I'm an adult who totally can afford these things (after bypassing all the roadblocks that the world's entertainment companies put for customers from Russia), I still pirate everything because that's what I'm used to, and that's what I'm convenient with.
With digital distribution, you still pay the full price, but your copy is "single-use" in essence. You're never getting any of that money back. And, the only way to buy games digitally is "new" for that full price.
And wallet and income of the consumers in region X of the world do not stretch magically because game companies in region Y decide to invest more on games. It is not that simple.
That's the part I'm sad about - that we won't get emulated games that look and feel better due to faster hardware in the future. Money isn't an issue for me.
You can't read it without breaking it.
I wonder if you really even need to hack the console. It might be easier to, say, subvert Rockstar's supply chain to put some code in the next GTA that spent a few cycles doing whatever botnets need to be doing.
They literally had a hard line in the sand. $600. If it costs more than $600 to hack it then they really don't care.
The other big thing is games being locked to a specific OS version, meaning some games require updates to play them. This has been key in their security strategy. It's basically pointless to hack it, it will be patched and you'll have to opt in to the patch to play anything new.
TPM designs that protect against such an attack will become a commodity reducing the cost to include it onto a console. Every desktop, phone, laptop, tablet, microwave, fridge, server, etc will all need TPMs. The demand and scale exists for this to become cheap over time.
Except it's usually not pirates who find these exploits, rather curious tinkerers that want to unlock the full capabilities of the hardware that they own. The pirates / script kiddies usually come in after the groundwork has already been laid by these true hackers. E.g. the people who hacked the Switch in fact condemn piracy and any discussion of it on within their communities will lead to an immediate ban.
I'm proud to say that I've hacked my Switch, but have never pirated anything on it. An impressive homebrew scene has formed around the console, which has produced gems such as Mission Control, allowing you to seamlessly pair third party controllers. I use it with my PS4 controllers.
Well, even the PS4, actually [1].
That’s not intended as a criticism of game development, just an expression of fear for the preservation implications. It’s no longer enough to preserve what’s in your hands—which is difficult enough where electronics are concerned—but now someone must find some way to extract, archive, and reapply all the day one patches, bug fixes, DLC packs etc.
This is what has to happen. I believe that as these consequences become more and more widely felt you’ll have a pretty strong mandate for some kind of change in thinking.
I mean, if you’ve actually bought the game (as opposed to streamed it) I think there’s a strong case to be made that you should be entitled to its use beyond the wishes of the copyright holder.
If you stick to PC instead, you’re still at the mercy of platforms like Steam. They can, and will, remove games over time. GTA being a great example.
Wanting to play a video game, and having to learn how to free up enough conventional memory in DOS that I could do so without giving up sound and joystick control, was really my entry into tech. I can't say my life would have been better without them.
On the other hand, they're as much of a time sink as you allow them to be, and in the last decade are increasingly also vying to be an unlimited money sink in the form of microtransactions, lootboxes, gimped free-to-play (or even pay-to-play!) with progression held back without paid boosts, etc. Should we want to engage with such dark patterns?
Once I got into Linux in the mid 90s, and especially once I really bought into the whole FL/OSS-as-an-ethos activist/evangelist stuff as a late-teen, my gaming options became quite limited. I spent a long time saying playing video games was bad, and a sign of poor life choices. I dialed back my rhetoric as I entered my late 30s, and I own and occasionally use a Steam Deck now. I even "own" Diablo 4 - failing to take my own advice here - but I do find it difficult to convince myself to invest time in what is essentially an MMO that will probably be reset or switched off at some point. There's no sense of permanence, and I have no faith that MicrosoftActivisionBlizzard will keep running D4 services for the next 25 years the way Blizzard did for Diablo II.
But I've got the farm now, and that will outlast me, so whatever. "Touch grass" as the kids say, but as a(n a)vocation.
That's certainly more than you wanted to read. Sorry.
Design has gotten a lot better and they have figured out ways to add fun progression to arcade style games.
I enjoyed for example the Uncharted games a lot. But I don’t think anything significant will have been lost if future generations of people don’t get to play the Uncharted games, no matter how much I enjoyed them myself.
Whereas, things like Pong, and Pac-Man and the first Super Mario games and the Pokémon Red and Blue and Yellow games feel much more important for me, and of course the original Doom, all of these are important on a whole other level. And thankfully they are all sure to be able to be preserved at least in some form.
* Basically everything FromSoft has put out (With Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring probably being the most important - Dark Souls effectively kicked off an entire genre because of it's popularity (technically Demon's Souls came first, but Dark Souls was the first one to blow up).)
* Breath of the Wild
* Escape from Tarkov also kicked off a new genre in the extraction shooter, although noone else has quite nailed it yet imo.
* The Witcher 3 (heavily influentual towards the design of Breath of the Wild, and a number of other open world rpgs recently)
* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3
* Skyrim
* Minecraft
* Dwarf Fortress (not exactly recent, but the Steam release propelled it into being much more well known)
* Path of Exile arguably revolutionized the diablo-style ARPG genre - any ARPG that comes out now is influenced by it - see Last Epoch for probably the biggest example.
Whether a game is "culturally relevant" or not really just hinges off of whether a significantly large portion of the population plays and talks about it for long enough though.
These days we get so many more quality game releases than we ever did in the 90s/2000s so it's much harder for a single game to grab everybody's attention in the same way that the stuff you mentioned did.
- Disco Elysium is a role-playing game largely about self-discovery and identity
- Kentucky Route Zero is a reflection on mortality and the true costs of poverty
- NORCO is a meditation on death and survivorship with meanderings into environmentalism and groupthink/cult thinking
* Breath of the Wild - boring temples, lifeless empty world
* Escape from Tarkov - unplayably buggy, awful servers, generic assets and models
* The Witcher 3 - good, but generic third person adventure/exploration
* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3 - incredibly generic fantasy universe and fantasy trope story
* Skyrim - incredibly generic fantasy universe and fantasy trope story
* Minecraft - actually innovative, creative, and unique game. What LEGO bricks were to kids in the 80s and 90s, minecraft is to the 2010s and 2020s
* Dwarf Fortress - cool indie game
* Path of Exile - a decent game in a dead genre. bad story/art style. only noteworthy thing is the gameplay is tight, but so was Diablo
( you're right they're all recent compared to Pong and the OP's point. )
Except BG3, most of what you've listed are around 10 years old.
BoTW: 7
Tarkov: 8 ( Technically, but was slow burning so hard to place exactly when it took off. )
Witcher3: 9
Skyrim: 13
Minecraft: 14? ( 13 if we're counting retail, but it was massively popular before then )
DF: 18?
Path of Exile: 11.
You skipped over mentioning Elden Ring, with it being from 2022.
Some others from the 2020s:
Hades, 2020
Animal Crossing, 2020
Among Us, 2020
Vampire Survivors, 2022
Half Life Alyx, 2020 (Still probably the only real example of a "true" AAA VR game)
I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.
This is exactly what I was thinking when writing this list, along with noting that OP mentioned games from the late 90's at the latest - my timeline for "recent" was pretty wide.
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"Culturally Relevant" to me means one of two things:
* So many people played the damn thing that it entered the public consciousness outside of gaming focused communities, and stayed there for a decent amount of time.
* It had a significant and fairly enduring influence on the design of later titles made by other studios.
You can tell within a few months whether a game is in the former category (Elden Ring, Palworld, Minecraft, Among Us, BG3 etc), but it takes years to know whether a game is in the second category (Dark Souls, also Minecraft to an extent, Path of Exile, Witcher 3, Tarkov etc).
And indeed, PoE of 11 years ago isn't comparable, even PoE pre-delirium probably isn't recognisable to current PoE, and anything pre Incursion certainly isn't, but that's the nature of a live-service game. The power creep post-conquerors has been incredible, and there's been essentially no effort to bring that in after they decided that a reset with PoE2 would be preferable than trying to rein in power creep in modern PoE, and that adding upper end aspiration content instead was preferable.
The decision to rein in power with expedition backfired so hard that people still complain they don't have an item editor with harvest. ( Although with Locks it's come pretty close again at the right cost. )
I think they made a good choice, PoE is better than ever, but it's controversial, and every patch post 3.14 has had a lot of detractors claiming that "PoE is ruined".
In terms of cultural impact, it's still interesting that it's such an "old" game that's having an impact on (gaming) culture.
If we're talking about wider culture, you're right that "culturally significant" can take time to materialise. I'm not sure Alyx or even Hades really makes the cut. They're great games of their genre but I don't think they've had the cut through that the others you've listed have had.
Among Us was a cultural phenomenon that was immediately visible outside of gaming, akin to something like Fortnite although perhaps magnified by the pandemic massively boosting streaming audiences and people looking for some kind of social connection through the internet.
Survivors has had a massive impact on gaming, it's created a genre of it's own ("Survivors-like" is a thing) which can be seen with the release of "DeepRockGalactic: Survivors" which is a great improvement on the genre. It's fair to say that while Vampire Survivors itself might not have the cultural cut through, it defined a genre of games that have inspired clones from Brotato to DRG and deserves its place on that list if we're looking at gaming culture, but it's too soon to say if we're looking at culture outside of gaming.
Yes, like -random example here- Uncharted :-P.
TBH i do not think what is "culturally significant" is something that we can answer right now, but something that will be up to future people to decide.
Though i do think that Uncharted is culturally significant in how it was part of a series of influences from the original Indiana Jones, to Tomb Raider, to Uncharted and back to Tomb Raider (in that each one of those influenced the next) - with some Prince of Persia thrown in for good measure. But for people to be able to tell, judge and discover these things, the games must be available to them - preferably in their original condition (remasters, rereleases, remakes, etc often tend to change things - though those should also be available so these changes can also be seen and perhaps talked about in the future).
Also not only "good games" or "influential games" are worthy of preservation - even bad or just mediocre game are worthy of that, for a variety of reasons. Games are often a snapshot of the times they were made at and multiple "snapshots" are always better than a single one. Even from a design perspective, a bad game can be interesting: for example the original Prince of Persia 3D seems to have been largely lost in the sands of time and yet it is an interesting game in its own right despite its flaws, in how its interpretation of (classic) Tomb Raider's controls combined with ideas from the original 2D games around realistic/captured animation ended up creating something inferior to its clear inspirations (but that is clear only really if you know about/have played the games that inspired it and know about/have played the game itself).
Of course if you just want to have fun, whatever is available on Steam will more than suffice.
Advanced Lawnmower Simulator probably has more cultural significance than "Another Call Of Duty 7", since I remember it from my childhood and an article gets posted that mentions it at least once a year. Does that make it a good game?
Definitely not.
Seriously, it’s converting people I never in 100 years would have expected to become gamers.
I think Pokémon Go was a much more visible and impactful phenomenon (in certain places) than anything else on your list. This might be different to "cultural importance" depending on your definition.
I mean did random churches and libraries have "Playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is not allowed here" signs up?
Were there flash mobs in NYC playing Half Life Alyx?
Fortnite certainly seems to be, for better or worse.
Plus they haven't made a good exclusive since Bloodborne. No Xbox exclusives afaik.
Don't worry, gaming peaked a long time ago. There's a huge backlog of great games that are better than their remakes like XCOM. Aside from graphics, I'd say AAA gameplay has even regressed in many ways. Indie games do their own thing and run on PC.
We're not losing much. Consoles have been dying for a while.
A while back I saw this clickbait video of "Gen Z trying out the original XBOX" and man that was a reality check as to how much time has passed.
For OG xbox, I was a definition script kiddie but I learned how to use FTP, how to connect via crossover cable, how to solder, the basics of what exploits are and how they work, and a ton of other skills that I use daily.
X360 required me to take the damn thing apart (which was terrifying as a 14 year old who wouldn't get a replacement if I broke things). I learned about firmware, SATA connections, the bits (I forget the name) that specify whether something was retail or not, why the exploit wouldn't let you run unsigned code, etc.
I was just a broke kid who wanted to watch movies and play games I couldn't afford, but it literally got me into tinkering and hacking, even though what I was doing wasn't much more than "follow a guide, script kiddy"
My computing journey started earlier on DOS but XBOX kept me going through a period of post 9/11 depression where the excitement of childhood and an amazing future was slowly disappearing. I stopped even playing video games after the end of the XBOX lifecycle (despite continuing to buy new gen hardware just so I could take it apart and admire the internals).
Now living in the post ChatGPT days and wondering about my future, i'm looking back wishing I could live through those late nights one more time.
They were playing the long-con game.
Gen Z is a pretty wide group. I am Gen Z and played on an original xbox. However at the time the PS3 was already out, as it came out not much later.
And in my region, the PS2 was much more popular than the xbox.
My sister however, who is only a few years younger, is definitely part of the iPad generation.
Everybody played the Wii though, hell I still play the Wii.
So 97 would put you around 4-5 years old when the XBOX came out. The video made it look like the XBOX was some ancient artifact to the Gen Z people. I guess if you were born in 2012 it is an ancient artifact?
Anyway, it's awesome that you'll eventually be able to softmod an Xbox without a specific game once the mods are integrated with this exploit. Good work!
MotoGP, crash team racing, powerdrome, crimson skies all work great https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/wiki/Supported_Games then sort by both total players and players per console descending
Is this single location lan something that has been lost since those days?
Any better ways to set up a temporary lan party for kids?
oG Xbox, Xlink Kai is still a thing. It was my first experience playing online as a poor 12 year old script kiddie myself.
For X360 LAN parties, It took a long time to find, but the hard-coded 4ms ping limit for "LAN" mode was removed, so LAN parties can be split into neighborhood LAN parties without problems
< HTTP/2 404
< content-type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
{"timestamp":1708462250423,"status":404,"error":"Not Found","message":"No message available","path":"/item/1005005142269614.htm"}xbox to hdmi converter. Useful if using an lcd monitor without analog input.
Haven't found a better "easy LAN party" setup than this.
A PC gaming LAN setup for 20 year old games is also dirt cheap but mostly requires 1 PC per player. The splitt screen support on PC is unfortunately very bad.
The "unhackable" Xbox One has had at least one userland exploit via attacking the web browser, but nothing came of it because they weren't able to break out of Hyper-V.
It's truly fascinating how often image format parse bugs end up being the entry point for attackers...
We were incredibly lucky to get one for the Switch BootROM exploit: https://github.com/Qyriad/fusee-launcher/blob/master/report/...
There were plenty of hacks that allowed you to circumvent this. Once you get some form of code execution on the Xbox, it's over, everything runs in Ring 0, meaning you get full access. You can use exploitable executables to maintain persistence without having to do any hardware modifications. However, all these methods relied on an initial entry through either:
A. Installing new hardware (a modchip) to run an altered version of the Microsoft Xbox kernel that doesn't perform the usual checks.
B. Transferring an altered save game to the Xbox through the memory card (internally it's just a USB drive), running the game and loading the save, which triggers an exploit
C. Booting the console (which unlocks the hard drive), waiting until the hard drive activity ceases, "hotswapping" the IDE cable to your computer, modifying the files, swapping it back and turning the console off so the drive locks again. (If the hard drive loses power, it locks itself again too, hence why the hotswap-which is not supported by the PATA standard obviously-is needed)
Now, with this, there is no more reliance on bespoke modchip hardware, aging vulnerable game discs or machines that you can still hotswap an IDE drive to. Which means that Xbox modding has gotten more reliable for the coming years. Which is good news in my book.
I felt like a warlock when I could rip my games after that.
Great memories.
And my mate at school saying there is no such thing as a soft mod! Haha
Soft modding the Wii was much more common.
Phones came out and killed homebrew. Now the developers developed cool super compatible stuff without needing you to hack the hardware plus games became stagnant on consoles. The PSP when I bought it was known as a boring rehash console with nothing but re-releases but the hardware made it worth it.