Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 121 posts

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#101

Post by prmoustache »

bowsamic wrote: post #84
prmoustache wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is irrelevant to how affordable or not it is for the end user.

If you can’t afford to pay for the labour to produce it, then why would you expect to be able to buy it?

You don't pay for the labour to produce it, you pay for a gamble over an investment. The labour to produce the game can totally be paid if the price of the game is reduced but the amount of copies sold increase by a significant amount to make up for the price reduction.

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#102

Post by prmoustache »

bowsamic wrote: post #90
grishka wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for not living in a first-world country and not having grown up in a rich family.

Games are a luxury, you aren't entitled to them (though in a third world country you probably aren't entitled to basic necessities either)

> you aren't entitled to them

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#103

Post by theodric »

nerdawson wrote: post #75
theodric wrote: post #20

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.

I don't know. Maybe. I've gone back and forth on this many times.

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#104

Post by honkycat »

theodric wrote: post #103
nerdawson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know. Maybe. I've gone back and forth on this many times. 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…

Games are better than they ever have been before, by FAR. You just have to look past the mainstream junk.

Design has gotten a lot better and they have figured out ways to add fun progression to arcade style games.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#105

Post by nebula8804 »

Levitating wrote: post #95
nebula8804 wrote: post #4

This soothes my soul seeing exploits for the consoles I grew up with. For a second it takes me back to a simpler time. The homebrew scene for the XBOX was more fun than the console itself! 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.

> 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

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#107

Post by sublinear »

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…

Console ownership isn't as popular with younger people anymore and their exclusive games are not what they used to be, so I wouldn't worry.

We're not losing much. Consoles have been dying for a while.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#108

Post by mrguyorama »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #66
grishka wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60 for a game is very expensive though. Especially so with digital distribution which means it can't be resold.

It's not expensive compared to what games used to cost.

When I bought a $60 game in 1996, I knew it was a complete product. It might have a bug that made it impossible to finish, but returns are a solved problem. I knew I had a product that was made, possibly incompetently, for fun, or to tell a story.

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.

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#109

Post by mdaniel »

harry8 wrote: 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?

Re: Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

#110

Post by pie420 »

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…

* 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 - 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

Post reply on HN