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Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

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Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#71

Post by reassembled »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #33
reassembled wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just this week a PC port of the 360 version of Sonic Unleashed was released that was accomplished via static recompilation techniques. It plays flawlessly and is really quite an impressive release. If this is possible now then emulation of these consoles might not be the only avenue to preserving their history.

Yes, but the graphics system for the game was completely reworked by people familiar with Sega's proprietary Hedgehog Engine. A straight recompile would have been unplayable.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I suspect many casual observers don’t either. So you’re suggesting they did this work with proprietary info they’d gained through work with Sega and thus broke their NDA?

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#72

Post by karlgkk »

kmeisthax wrote: post #43

I'm gonna be honest, I thought the story was over when they started talking about "oh hey here's this hypervisor code that loads extensions", because obviously extensions are going to be a massive increase in attack surface. But even then, the system wasn't actually broken by the extension being badly designed; the extension was just the most useful target to use the actual attack on. How the hell has this the Xbox 3…

Part of the reason is motivation

- if you hack a console, you can make a fair money, by selling your exploit as a package piece of software. Much like modchip vendors do. In fact, there have been a few software exploits that were sold with ties to a specific console. Funny if you think about it

- If you hack an iPhone, you can sell your exploit to many governments and government agencies for millions of dollars

If i were a profit motivated attacker, i know which I’d focus on

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#73

Post by matthewfcarlson »

com2kid wrote: post #24
hot_gril wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. They're slow, glitchy, and/or hard to set up. Related to what the other commenter said, anyone who says these are good must have a lot of time to deal with it, whereas I just want the equivalent of sticking the disc into the console. GameCube is the newest thing I've had a decent experience emulating, and even that isn't 100% unless it's Melee…

> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. This is unfortunate as a decade ago Microsoft had an internal emulator for Xbox 360 that ran at near native speed. I am curious if that emulator is what it used to play Xbox360 games on newer x64 based Xbox models, or if they are using a different code base. Either way, technically it is possible for the experience to be good!

Hands down my favorite thing about my time at microsoft as an intern was just a random brown bag lunch with the engineers who did the powerPC emulator for xbox360 games on xbox one. It was an incredible talk and they went deep and were happy to answer questions.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#74

Post by csande17 »

reassembled wrote: post #71
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the graphics system for the game was completely reworked by people familiar with Sega's proprietary Hedgehog Engine. A straight recompile would have been unplayable.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I suspect many casual observers don’t either. So you’re suggesting they did this work with proprietary info they’d gained through work with Sega and thus broke their NDA?

Not necessarily -- a lot of external hobbyist work has gone into reverse-engineering Sonic Generations, which has an official PC port and is based on the same engine as Unleashed.

Funnily enough, one of the most famous Generations mods is a project that ports over a bunch of levels from Unleashed. IIRC they changes the graphics pipeline to look and work more like the Unleashed one, too.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#75

Post by com2kid »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #73
com2kid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. This is unfortunate as a decade ago Microsoft had an internal emulator for Xbox 360 that ran at near native speed. I am curious if that emulator is what it used to play Xbox360 games on newer x64 based Xbox models, or if they are using a different code base. Either way, technically it is possible for the experience to be good!

Hands down my favorite thing about my time at microsoft as an intern was just a random brown bag lunch with the engineers who did the powerPC emulator for xbox360 games on xbox one. It was an incredible talk and they went deep and were happy to answer questions.

Oh damn, I was probably there at the time, working in the building, and was completely unaware of the talk!

That would've been awesome!

By that time though my org had spun out of Xbox to become the Microsoft Band team, so we didn't get any of the cool invites anymore. :(

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#76

Post by hot_gril »

perching_aix wrote: post #58
hot_gril wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10th gen i5(? might be another gen I forget, will check at home), 16GB RAM, RTX 2060ti, Win10

Could you be a bit more specific regarding that CPU? That's a very wide range.

i5-9400f, and I was wrong about GPU, it's 1660ti

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#77

Post by jamesfinlayson »

trashface wrote: post #67
jcranmer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Xbox 360/PS3 era of video game consoles is probably the hardest era to emulate. Subsequent generations of consoles are essentially the same hardware as regular computers, just with a custom OS (and known hardware profile, certainly a benefit over regular consumer PCs). But that era of video game consoles is the last gasp of the custom hardware design of earlier consoles, which is substantially harder to emulate b…

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

Which game?

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#78

Post by jamesfinlayson »

hot_gril wrote: post #36
com2kid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are still borderline unusable on my new-ish PC. This is unfortunate as a decade ago Microsoft had an internal emulator for Xbox 360 that ran at near native speed. I am curious if that emulator is what it used to play Xbox360 games on newer x64 based Xbox models, or if they are using a different code base. Either way, technically it is possible for the experience to be good!

I wonder about that too. New console supports only a subset of 360 games somehow, and with different enhancements. The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception, but it was noticeably slower than the original. Halo 2 on 360 has a shorter render distance.

> The 360 could also play original Xbox games without much exception

I remember there being a list of what it could play but I was never too sure how comprehensive it was. I know it couldn't emulate Midtown Madness 3.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#79

Post by rekoil »

trashface wrote: post #67
jcranmer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Xbox 360/PS3 era of video game consoles is probably the hardest era to emulate. Subsequent generations of consoles are essentially the same hardware as regular computers, just with a custom OS (and known hardware profile, certainly a benefit over regular consumer PCs). But that era of video game consoles is the last gasp of the custom hardware design of earlier consoles, which is substantially harder to emulate b…

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

Xbox 360 is also a PowerPC architecture, which on its own makes it quite a bit different from normal PC hardware, and even if that's a target that's more common to emulate there's still heavy performance losses in doing so.

It might have been easier to port to because of good OS design, but running games for it will still be inefficient compared to running on actual hardware.

Re: Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit

#80

Post by rickdeckard »

trashface wrote: post #67
jcranmer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Xbox 360/PS3 era of video game consoles is probably the hardest era to emulate. Subsequent generations of consoles are essentially the same hardware as regular computers, just with a custom OS (and known hardware profile, certainly a benefit over regular consumer PCs). But that era of video game consoles is the last gasp of the custom hardware design of earlier consoles, which is substantially harder to emulate b…

PS3 was wacky, but the 360 wasn't that different from a PC at the time. There were some differences in rendering API, it had a few features not available on PC hardware. And the CPU cores were actually slower than an equivalent intel, but you had 6 of them, rare for the time. If your game was relatively portable and already used a API relatively close to D3D, it wasn't too hard to bring it up on the 360. I worked on…

Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures.

You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch with a chipset Sony partially financed...[0]

There's a nice book about it from two of the IBM Chip-Designers called "The Race for a New Game Machine" by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony...

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