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Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

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Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#21

Post by jsheard »

auguzanellato wrote: post #18
azalemeth wrote: post #11

In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable and unbackupable, barring some tiny bootloader exploit, cheap TEM and an understanding of "physically uncloneable functions", or cheap and plentiful qubits. Things l…

> In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable 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 figu…

Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#22

Post by graphe »

geor9e wrote: post #15
bl4kers wrote: post #8

Why would I want to do this? It doesn't seem to mention that in the README

I guess the younger generation grew up with unmoddable consoles, so the concept is less known nowadays. The older audience immediately knows that it's for. You can run free homebrew apps, games, and if you really wanted, with a little more code, run pirated copies of retail games, and cheats. If you had a PS1 or Xbox, you got it modchipped by some classmate, everyone did in the 2000s, it was rampant, at least at my s…

PS3, PS4, Xbox, PSP, DS, vita, switch and maybe PS5 all have hacks.

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#23

Post by softfalcon »

codetrotter wrote: post #19
rusk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.

OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? 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 Bl…

Based on the massively positive response both inside and out of the gaming community… I’m gonna say Baldur’s Gate 3

Seriously, it’s converting people I never in 100 years would have expected to become gamers.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#24

Post by graphe »

jsheard wrote: post #21
auguzanellato wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable 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 figu…

Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug an…

Xbone has no hacks. It has dev mode, no exclusives both which killed hacking and piracy.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#25

Post by badsectoracula »

codetrotter wrote: post #19
rusk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.

OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? 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 Bl…

> OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years?

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#26

Post by p1necone »

codetrotter wrote: post #19
rusk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.

OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? 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 Bl…

There's been plenty of amazing and culturally relevant games recently, you just have rose tinted glasses for the time you grew up in (or you haven't been gaming much). I'll just list a handful of really well known ones.

* 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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#27

Post by badsectoracula »

graphe wrote: post #22
geor9e wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the younger generation grew up with unmoddable consoles, so the concept is less known nowadays. The older audience immediately knows that it's for. You can run free homebrew apps, games, and if you really wanted, with a little more code, run pirated copies of retail games, and cheats. If you had a PS1 or Xbox, you got it modchipped by some classmate, everyone did in the 2000s, it was rampant, at least at my s…

PS3, PS4, Xbox, PSP, DS, vita, switch and maybe PS5 all have hacks. 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.

Considering how often ModernVintageGamer uploads videos about new (and old) homebrew hacks, i do not think homebrew is that dead :-P.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#28

Post by estiaan »

p1necone wrote: post #26
codetrotter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? 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 Bl…

There's been plenty of amazing and culturally relevant games recently, you just have rose tinted glasses for the time you grew up in (or you haven't been gaming much). I'll just list a handful of really well known ones. * 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 (technica…

To be fair many of the games on this list would be trivial to preserve as long as windows remains backwards compatible with older software, and not too hard even after that. Breath of the wild and Tarkov stands out as exceptions

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#29

Post by ShamelessC »

codetrotter wrote: post #19
rusk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it saddens me as a vintage games conservator that my present day PS4 will be a brick in a few years. When I have consoles and games going back 40 years. It just doesn’t seem right.

OTOH, has there really been any actually culturally significant video games released in recent years? 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 Bl…

How recent are we talking about? Did you miss Breath of the Wild? Super Mario Odyssey? The Last of Us 2? Red Dead Redemption 2? Hollow Knight? Elden Ring? Half Life Alyx? Hell, Pokemon Go qualifies for cultural recognition.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#30

Post by coretx »

jsheard wrote: post #21
auguzanellato wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many ways I think it is really quite sad that we're at a point where blown e-fuses, encrypted everything and properly done public/private key crypto means that it's entirely possible that next generation of consoles really might actually be unhackable 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 figu…

Nintendo (or rather Nvidia) was behind the curve on fault injection counter-measures, Sony and Microsoft did their homework and it's never been achieved on their last two generations of systems as far as I know. Microsoft openly talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo Seriously, console security is getting really good. The Switch had some major hardware blunders between the bootloader bug an…

"console security is getting really good." - It's not nor will it ever be. There is no point in investing extra millions for let's say anti electron microscope measures for example. Developers aim for secure enough and don't care much about a single nerd who cracked his individual system using exotic specialists tools more valuable than the console and the entire game collection combined. It's more lucrative to just send a lawyer. ( Until it goes wrong. )
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