Xbox 360 Homebrew Scene Begins ?

November 30th, 2005, 02:56 Posted By: wraggster

As part of its Xbox 360 pre-launch amble, Microsoft touted its brand new console's fancy security measures, designed to keep out naughty hackers who might try and use the machine to blow up the world in a massive game of nuclear chess. Which happens all the time - we've seen it on the telly.
Anyway, some enterprising young scamp on the Gaming-Age forums has made a discovery which might show the first cracks in the Xbox 360's armour, signalling a tiny blossoming bud of hope for the console's homebrew scene.

Poster Rhindle was faffing about with the 360's Media Center Extender interface when he noticed that a couple of programmes were showing up under the 'More Programs' tab - and these were resident on his PC, shared magically via its Media Center Package.

Let's go over to Mister Rhindle himself at this point: "It's apparently very easy to integrate Windows applications into the MCE "More Programs" tab. All you have to do is build a link in a format specified by Microsoft and do some minor optimization, and the app will run in MCE.
"So I downloaded a couple of apps and installed them on MCE, switched over to the 360, and lo and behold, most of them run perfectly. I was able to run apps with modified browsers to pull down news stories, stock quotes, sports scores etc., as well as several Internet Radio clients."

He also apparently managed to get a couple of shareware games showing up and streaming on the 360's Media Center Extender but they crashed after a couple of seconds of running. Curse and darnation.

Quite what this find means in the grander scale of things is currently unknown, but it's a fair bet that there's a few eager beavers snorkelling in the depths of the Xbox 360 as we write, trying to work out how they can exploit this latest discovery for their own nefarious (and probably not so nefarious) ends.

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