#3419 musashi9:
That sounds like a hell of a lot of work by you and Phantasm. I never had an XBOX 360, did someone release the crack in the end ?
I guess they would have to modify the insides to make the crack permanent ?
Basically you could just flash a new firmware to the DVD drive that would tell the console that everything was fine, that the disc was an original. So you basically would write the ‘security sector’ to another sector of the disc, one that *was* writable with a dvd burner and then you would modify the DVD firmware to read it from that sector and make sure it would answer with the correct responses to the challenges.
Like I mentioned earlier, shortly after the hack I was contacted by some guy from Spain who ran a forum/shop, who wanted to buy the hack. I think this might have been Max from paradox cause if you google him you will see that he ended up with “GaryOPA” who at the time was also helping with the crack, so it would make sense that after I told him I wasnt interested in making money with this/selling the hack, he contacted GaryOPA. But that’s just speculation, I didnt ask him back then, so really dont know for sure.
Anyway solutions appeared shortly after, from people who made software solutions but also people who were trying to sell hardware based solutions. Basically, before it was just fun, everybody helping out together on the forum, adding something to the forum, really from a hackers perspective. We had people who were very good with the hardware, so they would dump things directly via soldered debugging ports and even were able to dump the communication between console and dvd drive. People who helped out decrypting things etc and a few who people who worked on the reverse engineering of which I was one. But once it was all done, it all turned into ‘business’, and people jumped in who just wanted to make money. I think that’s basically also what happened in the Amiga scene, you had people who were just in for the fun & fame and you had people who wanted to make money. I guess it’s always like that. But it kind of did turn me off. Obviously I’m not the one to be lecturing about ethics but I do feel that money should flow to the people who created the games, not the ones selling a hack. So that was also one of the reasons that I turned my back to all this. And I also really realized: hacking is one thing but creating a good protection, like nowadays there are some quite good software protections out there, that is intellectually way more challenging than hacking a protection. And you are ethically ‘on the right side’, which kinda feels good too 🙂 So I wrote a protection for some software company, wont mention which one, but it was a piece of software that quite a few hackers wanted to hack. It did get hacked though after a while, I think also because the company I wrote it for, didnt want to implement all of my ideas, because it would translate to not 100% compatability with some windows versions and would most certainly not run on future windows versions without modification. But it was great fun. I saw some of the others here from the old Amiga scene who said they’re now working for ‘the other side’ too, I think that’s really nice. The thrill surely is a bit less but in the end of the day, I think it makes people happier. But again, I shouldnt be the one lecturing about ethics here 😉