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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

#111
post #35

Aside: og xbox is not so expensive 2nd hand and a great way to set up a kids lan party. 1 old router, 3 xboxes, 3 tvs, 12 controllers, Halo gets you 10 year-olds' mayhem. Noisy fun. Arguably easier if xboxes are modded. 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 l…

Your link is 404, what was the title of the thing you were linking to?

Terrible! Clipping the tracking gunk after the ? in th url took out the l in .html

xbox to hdmi converter. Useful if using an lcd monitor without analog input.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005142269614.html

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#112
post #79
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as consoles have web browser there is a way. Ps5 was broken recently

Why? A web browser does not need to run under any kind of privileged mode, nor its library dependencies…

They often have backdoors to the system or vulnerabilities in JIT execution.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#113
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

* Basically everything FromSoft has put out - roll, roll, slice, roll, roll, slice * 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 - incre…

Great take, I agree with all of these

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#114

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…

> Pirates will always find a way

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.

https://github.com/ndeadly/MissionControl

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#115
post #21

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…

It seems surprising to me that they went from shipping a vulnerable WebKit with numerous public CVEs on day 1, to producing a more or less bulletproof OS?

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#116
Awesome! I'd love to see a detailed writeup on how the exploit works, if someone has the time and interest to put one together.

We were incredibly lucky to get one for the Switch BootROM exploit: https://github.com/Qyriad/fusee-launcher/blob/master/report/...

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we defining recent? ( 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.

The PoE of 11 years ago isn't the PoE that people rave about today, though. That's more of the past 6-7 years through today. 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…

> 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).

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#118
post #31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I would class making it uneconomical to hack a console for any practical purpose as "really good security". Could someone with nation-state resources hack the Xbox? Maybe? But who cares, they're not going to.

PS5 and XS was attractive hack target for crypto mining when it was boom and GPU were in shortage. I wonder anyone had hacked it (and keep it secret) or hadn't.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gen Z trying out the original XBOX 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.

You do raise a good point as Gen Z is around 1997-2012 (exact dates are always a little fuzzy) 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? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJEzvijyNmw

If you were born in 2012 you'd be born around the time GTA V was released for PS4. So the original xbox would definitely be considered ancient.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this as earnestly as possible: remember that pain and don't buy a PS5, or a PS6, or [...] Don't build any more emotional relationships with products built by rentiers that refuse to respect your ability to enjoy the perpetuity of your license (and god forbid even considering actually owning anything). Take on an allotment and breed a new hybrid chili pepper, or brew some beer and share it with your neighbors.…

Should we stop playing video games altogether then? 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.

Plenty of DRM-free marketplaces like GOG or itch.io are available. No restrictions, play it however you want.
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