24th July 2006, 9:58 PM
That is a hardware addon. I was talking about a software addon. The method I described would be totally free aside from the cost in programming labor on their end (and that XBox Live subscription money should be plenty to pay for that) and would work fine, if a tad on the awkward side.
Oh and, I think there may be a problem with linux on the 360 I hadn't thought of. Even without the hard drive, the 360's OS is built right into the firmware. Like the PSP, that means it is the FIRMWARE that needs to be hacked, because it doesn't run much software off the HD. What it does run are the backwards compatible data packs for emulation of specific games and also specific games stored on it. I'm pretty sure each and every one of those games has to be digitally signed to run. If that's the case, barring some sort of exploit or other security oversight, it'll require some sort of mod chipping to actually get linux on the thing, and at that point you can bet you'll get kicked off of XBox Live for having modded hardware.
Funny story, after Halo 2 came out, as well as a few of the map packs, I was playing an online game with a few of my friends against some team of cheaters. Not all of them were cheaters, but enough of them were. It became embarrisingly apparent that there was a REASON they were cheating. Well, they had two odd hacks (which I'm surprised went unnoticed server or client side). One was that one of them was "the flash" as we dubbed him. The guy was a speedster. The other was that any warthog 3 of them got into could be flown like a banshee, but also had the turrent and 3 person capacity of the warthog. Anyway, they almost lost to us once we actually caught on. One particular moment saw me right below them as they flew back to their base with a flag and one well placed rocket later, a flaming wreckage of shame came tumbling out of the sky. The other moment involved my friends keeping flash occupied with sniper fire as I actually managed to lead my shots enough to just kill the idiot over and over again. If they actually could play well, this cheating would have easily beaten us. As it stood though, they still won but only by a single point and only because of the time it took us to catch on to what they were doing. Anyway, one "cheat report" later, they were banned and soon after a patch was sent out which may have been intended to detect these sorts of cheating.
Oh and, I think there may be a problem with linux on the 360 I hadn't thought of. Even without the hard drive, the 360's OS is built right into the firmware. Like the PSP, that means it is the FIRMWARE that needs to be hacked, because it doesn't run much software off the HD. What it does run are the backwards compatible data packs for emulation of specific games and also specific games stored on it. I'm pretty sure each and every one of those games has to be digitally signed to run. If that's the case, barring some sort of exploit or other security oversight, it'll require some sort of mod chipping to actually get linux on the thing, and at that point you can bet you'll get kicked off of XBox Live for having modded hardware.
Funny story, after Halo 2 came out, as well as a few of the map packs, I was playing an online game with a few of my friends against some team of cheaters. Not all of them were cheaters, but enough of them were. It became embarrisingly apparent that there was a REASON they were cheating. Well, they had two odd hacks (which I'm surprised went unnoticed server or client side). One was that one of them was "the flash" as we dubbed him. The guy was a speedster. The other was that any warthog 3 of them got into could be flown like a banshee, but also had the turrent and 3 person capacity of the warthog. Anyway, they almost lost to us once we actually caught on. One particular moment saw me right below them as they flew back to their base with a flag and one well placed rocket later, a flaming wreckage of shame came tumbling out of the sky. The other moment involved my friends keeping flash occupied with sniper fire as I actually managed to lead my shots enough to just kill the idiot over and over again. If they actually could play well, this cheating would have easily beaten us. As it stood though, they still won but only by a single point and only because of the time it took us to catch on to what they were doing. Anyway, one "cheat report" later, they were banned and soon after a patch was sent out which may have been intended to detect these sorts of cheating.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)