Comment by autoexec
5 hours ago
> Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.
And this explains why it's stayed unhacked so long. There was very little incentive to hack the system when the games are all playable on a PC. Pirates, cheaters, archivists, and hackers could just go there. Microsoft's best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place
The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route.
There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features:
> https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/
Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode:
> https://xboxdevstore.github.io/
You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.
This is what killed Linux support on PS as well, Sony was disappointed with what was being done with PS2Linux, instead of indie titles.
Hence why PS3 Other OS no longer did hardware acceleration.
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I've seen this argument, but I strongly suspect that it's a cope argument. "We couldn't get in... because... we didn't care to! Even though we've hacked literally every other object on the planet just because."
The proof in the pudding of this will be when the Nintendo Switch 2 reaches 2035 with no cracks. That's my prophecy; that this time around the cat actually will catch the mouse. Between NVIDIA's heavily revised glitch-resistant RISC-V security architecture and Nintendo's impeccable microkernel, there's nowhere left to hide. DRM may turn out to have been a very slow long battle to "victory," not a "this will always be defeated."
I have my doubts. I suspect that Nvidia have made mistakes.
Anyway, situations like the one you describe are one to be solved by legislation requiring certain devices be sold as open devices that put power in the hands of the owner.
Well, and these systems are also designed with ratchet-type measures in place from the get-go, where holes are plugged, fuses are burned, and newly released titles will only decrypt/run on the latest OS.
So even if Switch 2 doesn't make it all the way to 2035 with zero cracks, there's a strong likelihood that any exploits found will be short-lived.
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> Microsoft's best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place
Maybe that's what they're trying to achieve with Windows as well.
There is this general vibe online that the newer generation xboxen are either bad, worse than playstation, or a straight up failure.
My series x, combined with gamepass, is by a very large margin the most at-home-entertainment bang I have gotten for my buck.
Before then I had what could be regarded as a "vintage" gaming PC: 1st gen i7 (nehalem?), a gts 450 and some amount of ram. An upgrade (read: full replacement) was desperately needed. This was in the middle of the crypto gpu boom, so a decent GPU alone would've wiped my budget. I settled for an xbox as it was cheaper than a ps5.
I've always seen myself as part of the pc master race, and thought consoles to be very limited. But man, it just worked, the games just worked, and gamepass made it all a total steal.
Even now, when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night, me and my wife's preferred entertainment is a session of bg3 over watching tv.
This is true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.
True, I'm not trying to diminish this guy's efforts to defeat all the obstacles MS put in his way.
>The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.
I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended.
Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.
I think they could have used some punctuation.
examples:
The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped, in better quality, on the PC platform.
The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped (in better quality) on the PC platform.
It's clear it means that there's a large overlap in titles and they are available in better quality on the PC platform?
I already acknowledged that part several times?
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Yeah, you couldn't be more wrong here. The exact same people who thoroughly destroyed the 360 badly wanted to attack this system - they were just outgunned.
The security was way better with the Xbox One, but also no one cared about the Xbox one. The 360 was the last successful Xbox.
There was a time when it would have been a hot target, but everything the original modded Xbox could do could be done easier elsewhere.
Most of what was done on an original modded Xbox can be done on a retail stock Xbox One/Xbox Series with the exception of pirated Xbox games. Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is just in the Xbox store, emulators and homebrew can be setup through dev mode with a little effort and $20. It's really just pirated versions of Halo 5 and a few others missing.
I know that's been dropping my level of interest for hacking consoles farther and farther. Why hack a console when it has almost no exclusives, even fewer of which I personally care about, and having a real computer hooked to a TV is no longer weird or difficult? I could fight to put an emulator on some locked down console or I can just install an emulator for almost everything ever made in like 10 minutes on my Steam Deck, so the choice is pretty obvious.
This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.
One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.
It might be coming as per GDC news, lets see.
The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). Before this hack, there was Collateral Damage. We were able to dump games with the exploit.
Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (the Legacy version) was of keen interest to our community as it would be playing LCE natively on a PC if you used a compatibility layer which never happened before.
So a few of my LCE cult friends contributed to WinDurango which was pretty much dead before they joined, and got Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to work.
Of course, you'd ask "why don't you just play Minecraft on PC normally?" Legacy Console Edition has so many minute differences and details that it's impossible to discuss all of them--things as big as the Minigames and as small as the mipmaps.
And then LCE source code from 2014 got leaked and that had a native PC port. Oh well.
Maybe cheaters want to cheat somewhere nobody else cheats. Idk if these games do online cross platform nowadays.
the main value is that it's way easier to make an emulator of a console than some point-in-time windows PC.
Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point.
Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.
I was vaguely aware this is possible although the "sign-up for a dev account and boot it in dev mode all the time", even if free, was still enough of a barrier that I haven't done yet. I'm hoping this hack eventually leads to a simpler "one-click" way to run emulation, home brew and mods while still maintaining full original game and media playing functionality.
Then I'll finally hook up the XBOne I have again and put it to some use on the downstairs TV. I already have a 'retired' PS4 filling similar role on the upstairs TV (although it must stay offline to remain 'liberated').
How is this the first I’m hearing of it? Looks like I finally have a reason to own an x-box, aside from the best version of Perfect Dark (the HD release of the original with modern controls, I mean) being on the 360.
They used to charge too but now it’s free. I got mine set up after about 30min of work a few weeks ago just need to actually load it up now. It’s tedious and you have to share your personal ID but it’s not difficult.