The millennium: a term that few had any use for before 1999, yet seemingly overnight it was everywhere. The turning of the millenium permeated every facet of pop culture. Unconventional popstars like Moby supplied electronica to the mainstream airwaves while audiences contemplated whether computers were the true enemy after seeing The Matrix. We were torn between anxiety — the impending Y2K bug bringing the end of civilization that Prince prophesied — and anticipation: the forthcoming release of the PlayStation 2.

Sony was poised to take control of the videogame console market once again. They had already sold more units of the original PlayStation than all of their competition combined. Their heavy cloud of influence over gamers meant that the next generation of games wasn’t going to start in until the PS2 was on store shelves. On the tail of Sony announcing the technical specs on their machine, rumors of a new competitor entering the “console wars” began to spread. That new competitor was Microsoft, an American company playing in a Japanese company’s game.

“[Microsoft] launches war against Sony for control of the living room.”

– Chris Morris, CNN Staff Writer

I Know Bunnie-Fu

Nearly two years after the world failed to end, Microsoft launched the Xbox on November 15, 2001 in North America. The console was more PC-like than any console that had come before it, featuring an eight gig hard drive, Intel Pentium III CPU, and cutting-edge DVD-ROM drive. Microsoft incorporated DirectX, their collection of Windows APIs, into their machine which is where the console derived its namesake. It was intended to introduce home theater PCs to the masses. The Xbox played games, played music, and with purchase of a proprietary IR remote dongle, it also played DVD movies.

The week after the launch, Xbox owners got an early Christmas present from MIT student Andrew “bunnie” Huang who published his exploits into tinkering with the console. He detailed how to extract the TSOP flash chip from the motherboard along with insights into the contents within. Huang had extracted the Xbox’s BIOS image and posted it for anyone on the Internet to download. He was flirting with fire, because a mere twelve hours after the post he received a cold call from a Microsoft representative. He posted that too.

Voicemail from Microsoft representative regarding Huang’s student webpage

With that kind of information now public knowledge, the first Xbox modchip came up for sale in May of 2002. The Xtender modchip promised to circumvent the copy-protection, break the region lock, and open up the ability to play DVDs without the need for that silly IR dongle. The copy-protection promise was just that, a promise. At the time there was no way to backup Xbox games, the discs were unreadable when inserted into a PC. As a result, modchips became the de facto way to play legal imports from other regions.

If you’d like to get deeper into Xbox hacking, or hardware hacking at all, the …read more

Source:: Hackaday